Betrayed

To Dror

("Art can bring us consolation as individuals, but it is powerless against reality". Romain Rolland to Stefan Zweig)

We sold our childhood
For the sweetest smell of glue
And a punch in the face
That could last longer
For an stage
That would resemble
A wall of quotations

Except your questions
That you wish I had asked
Before it all went underground
Before you stole away my mornings
And traded them for a skin
That would be easier to wear
A skin for loan

At times when I see you
It reminds me of an oak
With that humid sweat of hate
That I had framed in a wall
In a street whereby death visited me
More than oftentimes
Sometimes as a man of the cloth

But the oak one day
Was chopped down
As they wedded the poison
From the Garden of Eden
And they set Eve free
With the serpent
And deceive
I didn't mourn
Not followed the traces
In Templar cemeteries
When I lived in Mt. Zion

My oak used to wail sometimes
Whenever we laughed
It was the laughter of the pagan
That the prophet scorned
While he traded my skin
For a screen
Just like you did
Just like you do

You lived in that world
That Anje bequeathed me
While passing Breslau
In a thirsty silence
Wherever did prayer go?
In a world like that
There was no place for God
You live in that word
You barely know

Always a stranger at my door
Not unline my oak
Wailing from your beauty
Wailing for a Song of Ascents
David's murmur
That in a smile vanished
Into that small bottle
That made us adults
Only in the contempt
Only in the inability to repair
To mend

And the gateways to heaven
Remained also open
"It denotes an accessible or inaccessible throughway"
Thus read her lines
That fell upon your skin
Like thwarting iron
Melting with that inner desire
To create
To start anew
Which astrayed
With too much hope

And not just the mornings
But the twilights even
I lost
In Abendland
With the mornings thereafter
On those eyes of acute read
That survived the flesh
Embracing foreign bodies
Vivaciously foreseeing the day
When you'll tire
From this travail
And create a world
Of your own making

A world that will save you
Like Lessing's
And right there
Slightly puzzles
A bit in love, a bit in dread
You contemplated my sights
Through the smoke
Trying to knock on my door
Only to discover
That in language even
You were born in exile
Unlike Anje
Who once upon a time
Spoke in words

How your eyes
Do not cease to beseech me
In that cold blue
That falls out of your skin
As though your warmth
Were to repel them
And we exchange silent sights
That contain enough covetousness
For the generations of Noah

And there you remain
Driving northwards
Changing your fate
With every turn and every light
A man your age
Overtly childish
For wailing sights

Another betrayed world
You would say at ease
And merely going adrift
In mani-fold waters
That bemoan your nakedness
That beseech your childhood
That same old furniture
You left in my room
Inside an ashtrey
That seemly smelled to your skin
With its burning voices
That demand words
Those same words you didn't know
You lacked
Your writing on the wall
That your skin sores from
That world was lost with Anje
On the way to Theresienstadt

It's a sorry condition
That not even a God
We can assassinate
Is available these days
You only speak the language
Of reality
But it hurts you too much
And a screen
Will not turn in back those words
That separated us from the cattle
That separated
The earth from the world
Because once we've lost the philosophers
So went on strike the poets
Writing silent protests
And no one dared speak anymore
You stole my nights
And my twilights
And didn't replace them with words
You still asked me the same refined questions
Of the outsider
That can't penetrate the thinker's thick blood
You're still living in Anje's world
In a train-like mode

"The Sky is the Limit
And the Limit is just the first step"
Reads a Hebrew poem
But in a foreign language

Barbara's Ark

I saw you last in New York
Down that tiny passage inside an electronics shop
Right next to the gentleman carved out of advertisements
But at the time I didn't feel up to odes of any kind
And you were too seemly entangled with the smoke
As to heed the commanding God of the writer
To diminish yourself from
"Le plus haute tour"
Of your guilt
And land on your face to the world
Bleeding those little comments
One often makes blissfully
When staring into a hungry painter
Who refuses to draw the beautiful woman
And strives to glimpse the bad smells in her hair
Growing as a rich well of epiphanies
Planted in a Bohemian street
Right outside Agnes' window
Inside an empty can

That was of course before the creation story
Before that sickly perversion with language
That deceived both Adam and Eve
And no less than Lilith
The Midrash answers
To a question no one asked
Since the earliest beginning
Turning all possible knowledge
Into falsehood
Cueing to enter a church
Whose walls are papered with fingerprints
Of unsaintly book-covers and grass
To feed nocturnal lights
From Valle-Inclan's tortures
And at the time
I already learnt the Talmud
With Helen of Troy
Who abhorred the wisdom of the serpent
So that she translated herself into a woman

But today I still cling onto that yearning
For those printed days
Before my mani-fold exiles
Like when we finished the milk
In Jerusalem
Thinking of more innocent questions
That wouldn't ransack the imagination
From a comatose world
Whereby sanity turned into a commodity
And newspapers into the real life
Of a nihilistic sort
Nourishing our speech
With marzipan fingers
Cut out from an ocean of silences
And even then
Beneath the olive tree
Having forgotten my rosaries
On some coin-machine
I thought about Mephiboshet
Whose murderous screams
Didn't revert everything to a void-and-chaos
Whose silence didn't hasten the night
Bespeaking the treaty at Sinai
Poor Mephiboshet
That finished his days in a traffic jam
From Staten Island to your house
Awaiting a new world
That would be more just
With flitting eyes
Sipping ambar
From the comfort of an earthly home

And I remember having waited
While you were in the kitchen
Until Michal told Helen
Somewhere in the Talmud
That Jonathan had died
And we were then joyful
That this world might never be redeemed
"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us,
But unto Thy name give glory,
For Thy mercy, and for Thy
truth's sake"
Which expounded my most intimate doubt
Whether isn't it so that the truth
Is important only for God?
That to us he's bequeathed only one world?
And poor Helen was so disappointed
That she journeyed to seek an answer
From Rabbi Elisha
And when he informed her it was no longer important
Because we had exhausted the questions in Auschwitz
She had herself christened
But from her immaculate silences
I know she still loves Mephiboshet
Like the three sisters from the legend
Even that one who fled to Palestine

But it isn't too simple
And both Franz knew it
That we couldn't be too much at home down here
And it's all Helen's fault
And not the serpent's
Who shouldn't have been loathed
We would drown here down
And choke there up
For when I quit reading the Bible
Just like I didn't quit nicotine
I understood the tragedy of the philosopher
Which is tragic only insofar as
It is a parody
An awful joke
In that by accepting God
We've obliterated everything else
Even the world
The only home we had
And like Bergmann
All we can do
Is to gather details
Just in case

We've lost the firm ground of the soil
And we can only build houses of safety
From the Aufstand der Wasser
That will not eliminate our fears
But simply exclude them
Until that day
When we'll be swimming
Into life
Like we do in our earthly exiles
Among traditions and spaces
We'll be swimming into time
But for the time being
We can't know
We can't know
Just like with the revolution
We can't speculate too much about it
We need to experience the abyss
Right from the top of the cliff
Not just from the Polis
But from within the wombs of the earths
That lie beyond the apparent worlds
And the fictitious ones
And when we will
This will be no longer philosophy
Or language
Or anything we've known.

"Death will take the spectacular difference
Between fire and water
And cast it to the abyss" (Zelda)

D.

The bus stop makes me claustrophobic, and yes I know it stands outside next to a pretty supermarket. But there I share the dream of Thereza, that in which you never came. I know she was talking about a grave that contained an apartment in the bunker, like those you find in modern hospitals. It is pretty near, but why couldn't you anyway come home? We could drink some tea and I could show my latest poems, casually inexpensive as it's been my usual style. Perhaps you're better off not coming, I feel slightly exhausted tonight, exhausted from tomorrow, a temporal anarchy. I know I shouldn't talk too much, it makes me no healthier. I wanted to tell you I was listening to those songs of five years ago, when I more or less had a seemly interesting conversation with her, which was replaced by the electronic furies you expose me to unfailingly every weekend, when I take it for a task defiling the Bible. Yet on Mondays I'm as vertical as God, but most often have a very dim judgement. I'm slightly sleepy from the long cues in my room, awaiting for those moments of pleasure and unrest to relief my blood from the burgeois comfort of being immoral middle-class. The sky keeps changing all the time, I wonder... maybe the Phoebus is having another awry day, which often happens when you do politics and don't have the pleasure of dying beneath oceans of misspellings. Perhaps you fancy waiting for a little while? I want to finish my cigarette. Perhaps I also fancy awaiting a little more. Till that day when you'll fall into oblivion. That day you can phone me, I'll be waiting at the bus stop, a stone's throw from my house, and I won't remember all the songs. I feel fashionably tired, would you fancy coming another day? One in which I weren't to feel like talking. I'll hold those threads in my hands, to make sure that getting older will not damage your carelessness. I'll wrap them in hot desire, and then freeze them with betrayals. You can just as easily thwart them with the stupidity inherent to the middle class. Those who vote for nationalism, oh sorry... I thought for a moment I was talking to somebody else. I've bought myself new window so that my life can stare into the TV antennas and speak to them when you'll be around, so that a few glasses won't matter to much. Just like death convided Anja for breakfast, when both of us were hidden in my room where we no longer heard the sea-waves. She didn't have your charm, nor did I have the pneumonia typical of the jerking writer. I wouldn't write if you'd come anyway, I'd try to smile for pictures. I shouldn't tell you more about my beliefs, you might swell and burn, like the river beneath the tiny urban bridge. Five years ago, when I heard Kafka speaking for the last time. Since then, we only glimpse each other from a far, from a cliff paramount to being God. Would you fancy waiting till I finish my last cigarette? I bet you won't be late. For sure I can wait a little more, just enough as to treat myself to a new sight, just enough as to make you fit in my lighter. It's no problem, I understand... you warned me about rush hour. If you find my bodily hair somewhere next to the window, wrap it in desire, and worry not... for no person in utmost sanity would jump out of a window leaving an unfinished cigarette. I've grown the windows in my pane and wallpapers watering them everyday anew. The thrill disappears too, I might be waiting for you at the bus stop some other day, calm down, you can lie.

Cliff

A cliff of desire
Awrily wrapped in a northern voice
Like stationary
Irresistible and sweet
For sale
Like our dead
In foreign-language press
Deeply entrenched
Crouching before shrines
Of supermarket chains
And bodily pain
That ameliorates
Only with lust
With heroism

A cliff of desire
In a city grown out of a pane
Where I kept conversations
Embalsamed in sweating phrasings
Exhausted mornings
Sleeping away in cafes
Sickly embroidered
On threads of hunger
For the raving street
For visual starvation
For contamination
Your publisher
His advertisements
On fusion food magazines
Political statements
Borrowed from Auden
About screeching sounds
That rip off the flesh
From a marketing survey
That turns you
Into grains of sand
As the progeny
Of a Biblical man
That bore no name
That beared no thing
He wore a tie
Adulterous hinges
Watched him sleep
He resembled that smell
Seemly of machinery
He resembled a type-writer
His plain clothes
Weary from statements

L. Waits

An old alley
Cunning beneath glasses
That could remind you of any place
But one
The long waiting lines
A tax-returns' cue
But inside your room
Faltering in what you need
As though it would really matter
In a day
To grab the world in one hand
To understand
To breath in

Conspicuous hours
Of conversations
Lacking in tar and nicotine
Lacking in caffeine
Exceedingly fearful
From that authenticity
Of the Gospels' author

Tired
From your own freedom
From those small choices
That lead to the wardrobe
With old wooden boxes
Containing unanswered prayers
Letters from a previous life
Even thoughts on Aristotle
Unsophisticated
Raw as your adolescence
Furious
Decadent in their abscence
Of wordliness
Of worldliness
Empty of recklessness
Items from the shopping channel
Containing oblivion
Empty chairs
And unwashed sights

It's rush hour inside here
But you couldn't be any less bothered
In your Angst
In your greed
In your unsound faith
Peering into a vacuum
Containing modern quotations
From interwoven stories
As though you yourself
Like Miriam
Could write your own legends
Like a grown-up Zelda
In anarchic language
Of saints and warriors
Of Christian mythos

He seems to run out of time
You tell yourself
Without being sure at all
For how long you've awaited
For how longer you will
Not at all taking pride
In your ability to hang
From threads of conceitedness
Of yearning
Embracing little artificial bodies
Like ties
Like lies
Daying anew
As though it were a rendez-vous
Of that warm day
When you saw the city springing forth
From within the aether
And turn firstly into light
Then into buildings
Brothels
And so on

And he never rang again
After you shaked his hand
Wasting away
Two long years of whimsies
As though you were unprepared
To defy Gods and others
For the sake of a little sly
Of your own personal convenience
To keep you safe from betrayals
From adulthood
From satisfaction

Ransacking your own spaces
In the wilderness
Growing your windows
In a pane
Watering them anew
Every morning you awake
To the same oblivion
Of the blurry sight
That estrangement gifted you
Your problem with language
Unable to see
Limited
As though it were a piece of china
Useless for the posterity
But valuable
For a day like this
So flatly happy
Irrationally kind
Filled with tantrum
Divorced from the air
Spring-like

Befitting
But unimportant
Calm down
Inside a hole
Curdle up inside
For it might hurt
It might end up in scotch
In a world

Ubi Est Germania Urbis?

That used to be part of the everyday Salerno cliche in those days, when Christina found me one day idly sitting in a poorly heated reading room. Then the most urban of all Italian styles charged with the strongest espresso and all types of biscuit assortments in a feigned company. It makes me slightly concerned that I can well think my pasts five years back with the clarity of a morning hue. It's been almost five years since that blissful evening under the bridge almost swelling with the brook that sprang forth from the hills and mountains that used to hide me as a child. We no longer correspond... not with Christina or Fernando. The death of Oriana Fallaci suddenly reminded me of Cecilia, that friend betrayed so many times, in whimsies of manifold colours tantamount to those found in the ageing walls down that narrow alley where the Poetry Institute used to be, just a few meters away from the old Russian cinema. Whereby I all alone discovered Magnolia one day, the same theatre where I dreamt about taking Oscar, even though we did go to the movies once but in the larger theatre close to Salerno... One of those movies one shall never really forget, "Ar-Men".

In hindered dreams I would see myself today with him watching some old movie in the Russian theatre, something subtitled and stranged, one of those movies for subtitled imaginations. Five years that disappeared into the sea in Tel Aviv and sailed away with Odysseus into the night; even my home in Tel Aviv sailed away. So did the letters from that period except for a very few awrily written journal fragments. Like the one I wrote after I left home in the cold of that hotel room, not long before I met Oscar and only a couple of months before I locked my childhood in a quarantine room and took the next plane to Frankfurt without turning back to look at my father. Five years ago I used to listen to that song, at a time when I didn't own a computer or even a small stereo. If somebody would have told me that five years later I would be sitting in Jerusalem in the late summer writing this epiphany I would have never believed it, lest had I met Aviva earlier on. A man's toil and travail not unlike Abraham's. A saturday morning that wouldn't be a memento of darkness. From a cold hotel room to the burgeoise of Ashkenazi Jerusalem. One in which fear would seemly be a thing for another day, just like people drink pastis on Tuesdays and martini on Fridays. Those were days when I didn't think about death; because I was too young to philosophize with others, to think about beauty or death, about politics or metaphysics, about mortality or natality. Even after my arrival in Tel Aviv I thought still only about a couple of short poems no one knew. Too unconcerned with the humanity of God, with worldly pain.

I was simply an observer, like the invited country boy glimpsing the courts and the yellowing light of modernity. I wasn't a modern man in the sense that the questions didn't trouble so much as comfort did. It was unimportant to think existentially, and rather strayed on thinking beautifully, but at the time I didn't write, I didn't need it, it didn't murder me over and over through the daylight hours in wanderings of unread books. I didn't know love too well, even though I suspected he must have smelled to Fernando. And love in the masculine unlike in the German language, because before being an Ashkenazi burgeois I was a Greek. I wish nowadays I could make pictures of my room and my democratic bookshelves. I didn't know Hannah Arendt at the time, but I did know Heidegger and I loved him as a father, worshipped him as a God. It was the right thing to do for any Christian thinker, for anybody who sat at Giorgia's feet to devour each and every Greek word that would shed light on our tragedies, on our questions, on our cigarettes. I owe particularly most of my mind to her. As a mind I was born at age 15, firstly with Maria Jesus and then with Giorgia. As a person I am still experiencing my mother's birth pangs, not unlike Rhea. At age 22.

It no longer bothers me whether my father can answer my questions or not, it's no longer relevant. I've stared into the sun myself and it certainly burns like caustic waters sweeping your veins in the rush hours. I couldn't wait for those private hours, I chose my exile. From the language and the people, from the imagination and the mind, from the tiny houses and the schoolmates, except for Mario who I most fondly remember, and in four years I have to start looking for him in Madrid to follow that childhood promise. The only one I ever made. Perhaps Julia will make things collide, I don't know. I learnt to love my body and to fear death, to fear death more than the taxman, more than romantic defeat. I learnt to love the questions and to remain quite unhindered by progress. I learnt to forget about them all, reason for which I need to write, to write as I need water and air. I need to find the public eye and be drawn to the public world, to the agora. A need to walk up-straight.

I learnt to wait. It might happen one day. Exactly what, is a matter of discussion for a less blissful day.

Adam

Unwittingly I had looked forward to this day, from all days under sun not unlike Salomon's prophetic dream, but I wanted to spend it with Mephiboshet under the shade of that more innocent friendship past the mill in Yemin Moshe and the orange fish, from a little scrap of paper containing one of Zelda's most beloved poems.

Mephiboshet (1.977)

Your flitting eyes-
Small birds sipping nectar.

When you wept
The King did not hear.

When you fell,
The world didn't revert
To void-and-chaos.

Mephiboshet, you dreamt
Of a more innocent friendship.

You abhorred the wisdom
Of the ancient serpent.

O son of Jonathan.

When I wrote down that poem from a new volume at HUC into my journal, altogether with letters from Marcuse to Heidegger I still lived in a fragmented world, in one of manifold exiles. The exile from the language and the places, from the people that I had known in such days that flourished green down a valley extending itself all the way through the Nordau Alley in Tel Aviv reaching my cage window with its bars, at a time when I no longer heard the sea-waves and withal I only cheerished breakfasts in Ashtori beneath a glowing oak that light up for himself a Marlboro light every couple of words and seemed puzzled at my never finishing my breakfast. But I had been right at the time, if at all only in not finishing the breakfast. That cup of coffee would feed me in the dark all throughout the trodden path to Jerusalem.

The exiles always made me think of Bonhoeffer, on that conversation about being an exilee and being a refuge, because usually a refugee is one forced to flee to a foreign country seeking protection. An exilee is the one who perhaps even among his own peers and language and fatherland, has been by necessity set aside. Just like the adulterous woman is set aside and forced to drink the bitter waters that will either leave her unaffected and swell in her belly until causing her the most painful of all deaths. And in some exiles not even the bitter waters are provided, only the condition in which one's temptatively forced to drink them, even from a empty glass.

At the time when I dreamt of Mephiboshet the world seemed an acquous pervertion, and only in the churches I found a seemly comfort, that palace in time that apparently had been built-in, but I semed unable to operate it. I wondered in the ancient quarters all the way up to Mt. Olives desperately lusting after passion, even in Gethsemani my hands and my journals found me slightly immaculate as to hurt. I learnt to crave for silence and for those screaming dark voices that pollute the noise until it becomes a deadly silence. I learnt often not to speak to myself. I lost weight, became interested in politics and even vowed before the Lord of the Cross. As though carrying crosses were some sort of Christian hobby for displaced impotent pilgrims.

And recognizing myself as a part of the local landscape I dreamt of Mephiboshet almost at every hue of a corner that was seemly greener or livelier. I also learnt that I'm not a screen. Needlessly obsessed with the recovery of the public world, that world I had myself obliterated and whose cunnings were nowhere to be found in a Roman misal. I aspired to be less declasse aristocrat and more burgueois, full with those petty everydaily obsessions. The hours did visit me, and so did the houses even though I did make the pilgrimage to Emmaus.

It is difficult to unlive an exile, in the capital of all possible worlds. I started to read less, because I've been often entangled with the hours. It didn't all end here, I just found once at all the train station, and those little choices that make one into a number more in a marketing survey list. This day truely means nothing, nothing at all. But from my own bed I can peep into the ugly towers that seemly flavoured my pages from Gadi's window, and even when I cannot help talking over with the TV antennas no oaks pacify my view, gloom my view. I can only stare at the sun, but my mother preached me strongly against that. It's a designer's toil. They wrote on my whiteboard that dinner was great. I did encounter Mephiboshet this time, his name is Dor.

11:17

It feels as though one were racing with God withal
In a bachelor's party
So that everyone could hearken to our pleads
And accounts of different follk-tales
Of well too-known people
In a family portrait
That makes our talking believeable
And in those alleys
Marked everywhere by quotations
The days sleep inside a curdle of confort
That wasn't either gratuitous or fortuitous
But a mere sketch of a sculpture
That one didn't mean to complete
Speaking with a solid voice
As to resemble one stone next to the other
In a conversation of Titans
Tasting some authenticity
That in its truthfulness summons death
For another party in an undisclosed location
Seemly vain for pilgrims
And recondit for us
Retelling stories that make us very unproud
Very unnatural
And even sore
From unempty glasses
Framed in white pages
That no one dares to read
Fearing translating himself just too intimately
As to drift away in a tiny tea-pot
That is unlike others
With that holder of silver imitation
Sailing away into the unnight
Coming into light from a vacuum in the stage-set
Hairdressing pens
Sharpening
Sharpening ourselves with time
Beneath the music of Nietzsche's sister
Beneath an arp
Dying slowly unto our coffee
Craving for a view of the day
Of the day
When I lied
When I held
When I set unfree
Because it was easier back then
To be somebody else
Than it is today
To be somebody like you
Less an anonymous figure
With a face
That hearkens to the smells of the eye's glimpse
Radically new
With Heidegger
Toiling for some light

Hungry for Sincerity

Less than twenty-four hours make the difference between life and death, between choices and spades, between fate and strike. The post-mortem of a strife, longer than the life of a book being written and perhaps just as much pained. I cannot help the feeling of looking at those pasts as though they were lost forever, as though no repair or atonement was possible. But just as shamelessly I could say that I do not have regrets, because the choices were not as simple or as blackened but rather hued in between angry morning and tar-coloured nights. Days during which every sort of possible pleasure made the difference between being me and somebody else, between losing my sanity and recovering it for a couple of hours, or for a day even sometimes.

Two years endlessly trying to recover my pasts and my persona, and by detour committing more betrayals than one could count with the hands of a hundred people, so many of them as fall into oblivion. It hurts, I will never deny it. It is a stone in your shoe for as long as one has lived, it is a lack of repair and a restless nightmare. Those faces all pass in front of me today, this very morning as I feel myself shiver before the end of this chapter. Before being into the world again. I would have never missed these two years, had I had the choice to do so. Sooner or later I might come to regret it, even this afternoon as well. I might have strived so long for nothing, I might have committed all possible mistakes on earth only in order to see this day dawn on me, but I cannot think about that anymore. I cannot think about that world whereby I shall be so comfortable at home. I prefer the striving. The journeys. The lack of wisdom and excess in witty.

Those journeys in which I created worlds of my own, as a Semitic God only in order to destroy them all over again. Most of those worldly buildings were not even of my own liking, and they succeeded in displeasing me all the more, in destroying my speech, my manifold forms to translate myself into spaces and times. They blurred my history. But I carry no shame to this very day, I do not feel sorry for myself or anybody else. I only did what I had to do, in order to remain alive and to wear this caffeine-tanted smile that deliberately surrounds me. Perhaps I will never stop feeling guilty and feeding my disappointment in small bits of glowing anxiety. But I remained alive. I lived through the most intense years struggling with God, but above all with myself. Struggling to find out whether my limits had any working powers no more, whether I could bring myself to make the right decisions. Small everydaily choices in between potatoes and beans that helped me keep unwounded. The roads wound before me. I became mute and unable to move invisible spaces, unable to make real choices.

Life will take its share due of time, but as long as I can be eternal enough as to build my own worlds it no longer matters. I have different tools to look at myself. To loath myself. But it is not important. The worlds were at stake, when the chips were down.

18:00

Into the world again
As though the fringes would cover me up
When the hinges uncovet my recklessness
Sailing away in a urban boat
That contains more fear than love
That contains an unknown form of comfort

The city is seemly overtly illuminated
And tirelessly I shiver into the motions of machines
In plastic-wrapped dreams
That resemble being childish
And sometimes even queer
Living in a phone-boot

The summer rains frentically on me
With smiles packed in vertigo
The pleasure of regret
The surrounding voices
That cut through the flesh not unlike leaves
Falling from within a signal of no-life

Too many things run in front of me
My pasts, my sorrows, my shame
The days of old, always fresh anew
In the darkest alleys of a book
Whose author feared, whose author murdered himself unto
A certain morning, over the dread of cold paper

I let myself go loosen
As though all this had no repair
Had no substantial condition
Untrodden paths marked by empty glasses
By highways stricken with silences
That spring from within a sore wall

I no longer suffer from his ailments
Which once meant life a whole
Then turned into dust
And awoke to a forest three weeks ago
But it isn't important
After all, he's no longer an oak.

Ofer's Table & The Hours

Officed-in

I thought about this note ever since Friday, day in which I contemplated the possibility of devoting sometime to this stream but the heat, the smells of Shabbos and the contemptuous glittering eye of Tel Aviv made it impossible. One should not write this kind of postings as though one is writing memories from a long-forgotten childhood among nuns and strict grammar teachers but rather as a journal diary, very different from the impressions you get when entering St. Stephen's and more in the spirit of Bergson, it's difficult to shape styles intentionally though unless one's writing satire, and because of an underlying discussion over a poem of Vater Goethe (as Rahel called him) that's very far from possible.

Journeys always take unexpected turns, as though one were to turn asides and inspect ants alongs the way just for long enough as to miss the last bus; turning aside like Moses, "for whose works are praiseworthy?"; the sentence in itself has a very Christian flavour which challenges the limitations of the English language, the only language I claim fit for my writing. There are journeys through the most diverse natural phenomena; journeys through Italian churches, through Orthodoxy, through self-discovery, through philosophy, and perhaps above them all is Plato's, the journey of the "good". The latter takes for me a rather different form than the bi-partite worldness of the Athenian and I feel much closer to Abraham, as though it were all a travailing with God's designs and desires, particularly with desire... as though the world were created at every moment of the day.

I've journeyed through two different cities and even as many wonderful men in the course of my life as an adult, one that remains as a pistol-shot in the middle of mass and the second as a thief that abducts you at night and disappears with the waving of the skies, all camouflaged beneath the tallith of the Eternal wafting in manifold blues down a flu-striken highway. It all must have started in a church I suppose, perhaps the Liturgy of the Hours after the Easter somewhere in Emmanuel.

I remember Ofer's table then too, with a little bit of regret and a very very saddled happiness that always intoxicated me to the point of physical pain yet sparkling with circles of vicious tenderness and the most whimsical of all possible moments. Almost lifeless enough as to become a dogma for a new creed. Those weren't happy days, I saw myself obliged to lie too often, to covet my father's nakedness and my own as though the gravest of all possible sins had been committed. Days in which the world trembled underneath with each posession, each achievement and each day of life. A punishment that could only be ameliorated by iridiscent cups of coffee in a cafe that no longer exists, whereby you could see a very long street of Tel Aviv and yet hide from within tall well-brushed plants.

I used to write some rhymes there, all of them truely bad. Plus it was worse than that, Ofer couldn't understand the language. We seemed to have been educated in different worlds and I felt envious with rage. I for one in the Classics, the Victorian literature next to Goethe and Heine, the New Testament and Existentialism. He in the other hand in things I had never uttered before out of shame - utility, leisure, amusement, credulity, security, trust, restlessness, reckless. My education all seemed to have been decided upon only in order not to provide absolutely any skills for life, an education that could have been useful only had I been born in a different social class, either very low or very high. And since I am a Jew I remained chained to the burgeoisie. All what my education could provide was a possibility to write.

That of course in a very narrow view, for even when I no longer yearn for a home with the Lord of the Cross and the whimsies of virgins and mythologies that was the only possibility for my mind to have been born as a thinker. It was in the Gospels, the Mysteries, the Hymns and the Saints that my curiosity sparked one day during my early adolescence never to let its voice down. At the time it seemed as though he was just trying to humiliate me about every single detail, and accordingly I couldn't help the necessity for hurting cynical answers to the least troubling and most everydaily of questions. He was one of my first journeys to adulthood, and by that I do not mean the people whose nakedness I uncoveted, but those with whom I uncoveted an own nakedness that can be frentically and morbidly observed ever at the table.

I would lie by saying that I didn't miss him, but truth is he had fallen into the most absolute oblivion. He's still in oblivion, and I know it because the blistering thorns became entirely painless... at most very exciting and sweetening to the extreme, but certainly painless. But he's not been the only journey, which makes me rather happy. It makes me even more so that he hadn't been around as to see me, because then I could have felt I loved him just like Franz loved Sabina and the disappointment before the nihilism inherent to the enterprise would have poisoned me. He didn't meet Vitaly, in whom he would find very little pleasure other than the plastic one through which he takes delight in being Greek. He doesn't know Vitaly also made me tremble, so hard that I was willing to atone him for the silence, because somebody wrote me letters that were harder to read than Aquinas. Not because they were overtly wordly and complicated for the language was rather cheap and almost systematically excerpted from a couple of novels.

But somehow those were the letters of a man who wrote honest things, who truely hated me with uttermost respect and who never took pride in silence, but rather self-shame. That makes it quite yellowed when weighed against somebody who never wrote a simple word. But that was the design of the Providence, perhaps a single word or touch about 6 months ago would have killed me in the fashion of Theseus, not because I hurted at him but because I hurted at hyself exceedingly. He just decided to rain one day when I had wanted nobody. That's Norrine's... A man who calls you only when he's by no means needed. And for a change, I never wrote to him honest things, only perhaps I discovered literature isn't quite like rhaetorics only very late in life. Late in my adolescence I mean. Perhaps in every line I wrote him even the "and" or "," were some sort of disguise, a lie, a meant-to-be metaphor for an immediately necessary form of Angst.

It has taken me more than a year to forget those days, except that one when we went out for breakfast after which I wrote that poem I threw away and that happened to have come true to the detail in the last week. I wasn't thirsty to flee but in little circles I defined Zeno and tip-toed all the way to Jerusalem in the most timid of all fashions. It took me a lot of ennui, and not enough alcohol. But I stopped feeling guilty for a change, because I simply saw the contigency in the idea of survival to such an extent that I wasn't even open to any discussion about it. After that day shortly following our dismise when I found myself at Adam's table for a whole day... after that morning suicide attempt and that letter I wrote him pasted on a postcard of the Swiss landscape, quotations from the prophets and a passport-size picture of Anne Frank. I lost mostly everything I had but my books, even my old faces and my old eyes and my old mouth. But I have no regrets, and were I to be in such state of despair, I would do it again. Again would I journey so far down the mind to places so dark that not even Ofer can look at.

And even when for some death would be a preferable option, I couldn't make that choice. More than anything I wanted to live and couldn't care less about the price. If this price was unhappiness, then I was willing to pay. The thought of life and death, specially death. It doesn't escape me anyway, that very same thought, but I'm no longer swollen by the fear. I thought I just had to live to remember the world; to remember Tel Aviv and my father, my little tiny apartment with the old Polish cushions and the dinners I made out when my salon guests would be around. The past would crouch before me and ask for a time out in some holiday resort, in the fashion of Etienne Gilson.

I thought the struggle would end one day, until I stopped struggling. It lost worth, I gained life. And I kept waiting and waiting on and on and praying... I prayed for happiness, for freedom, for joy. As my struggle halted I saw happiness coming from somewhere and I began to think that was perhaps the beginning of happiness. But I deceived myself, perhaps because the waiting had taken too long. I didn't want answers any longer, for they were too simple as to attain the meaningfulness of the questions and my world became Lessing's; at least thus said my friends during my birthday dinner which was rather lame.

One day I just woke up slightly older, thinking that it wasn't the beginning of happiness or of anything. That this life itself was happiness and that for nothing in the world I would have traded Ofer or Vitaly, my days in yeshiva and my nightly escapades, James's gloom and Stephan's varsities. How could I trade on the hills of Beit Jamal and the nightly views of the ancient towns? Perhaps the Vesper and Lent? No. Even the Liturgy of the Hours so much not. The fact that I have received a past not as a willy-nilly but as a testament tells me only the examination of it can be contraceptive to the future suffering, not to prevent it but only in order to be able to live with it as though you were living with an old maid that betrays you from time to time but always lovingly turns to you.

It was in the weeks, the days and the hours. It was in them that my happiness was, everyday in simple living. In the life that I gained by splitting my thinking space into being a person and being a thinker. Happiness can never mean completion or fulfillment, at least for the Biblical man. I returned to the table and found it not unlike the day before, because I had been there that day too. The walls belong to my past as much as the dust and the untidiness and the man. I could sit at the table and tell the truth, I could even show anger.

I smoked a cigarette, and it was the same old little plate. He looks much older - not the plate, but that's an irrelevant thought. Before I left I was no longer afraid it would be the last time I saw him, because if it were even so he's one the treasures of my past and that unlike Sylvia I'm not any willing to bury with untimely memoirs, trying to build new layers of concrete and paviment for a new season stage; I suffer from stage fright. I thought that day I loved him a little bit, I hated him a little bit. Just enough to be good to him, just enough to be good to me. Just enough to find happiness in the hours, in the hour. "I'm hourly" said Goethe, and for a change I no longer counted the hours and mourned over him in my sleep like Tereza. How inscure! but how beautiful too. I didn't read Homer this time, for perhaps I'm too one of the moderns:

"All words like Peace and Love
All sane affirmative speech
Had been soiled, profaned, debased
To a horrid mechanical screech" (W.A. Auden)

I wasn't sufficiently embarrassed as not to have my own thoughts and my fears. I stopped fearing that he would find me one day down the street and would think me unbeautiful. How venomous it was to hold my own thoughts about him, but how radically truer. I discovered the most important thing to know about Ofer, he isn't an Oak as I had thought. He's a desk-man. For I discovered late in history he's got one, just like I became acquainted with Marx. It's beautiful to think he's travailing somewhere out there, and I no longer see fit the writing of riddles and puzzles as not to let some name in or out. He's already a Writing on the Wall. He can't be an Oak, "Nature is dead, mein Kind".

Letters from Jerome Kohn to me

It's weird after all this time I've been unable to put a note about Hannah, and so it remains. But as a consolation I can publish two letters I received from Jerome.

21.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thank you very much for what you wrote. I've read your letter over morethan once, and want to say how interesting I find it, and how sensitiveand intelligent I think the writer of this letter must be. "Wohl dem,der keine Heimat hat, er sieht sie noch in Traume" -- what a wonderfulway to understand Pariahdom.

I don't know if Hannah ever felt fully athome in the world. In 1954, when she was here in America, relativelysafe, and relatively well off, she wrote this poem:

Ich lieb die Erde
so wie auf der Reise
den fremden Ort
und anders nicht.

Somehow I think you will appreciate that. Weimar-like letters--yes, the Internet has done away with that sort ofthing for the most part, yet not entirely! I don't know if there is anyway to study Hannah's ideas on judgment other than by entering into athinking dialogue with her.

When I try to do that, on the one hand,there is a lot of time spent reflecting on specific works of art; on theother hand, it sometimes seems absolutely clear to me that the thinkingego has to go through willing to come to judgment, which makes herremarks on Kant and the French Revolution so very meaningful.

With all good wishes,

Jerome

22.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thanks for writing again, and so quickly, and so late at night. I am impressed by what you say about the "banality" of goodness--bywhich, I take it, you mean good works. About that, I think Hannah wouldagree. Do you remember in THE HUMAN CONDITION how she differentiatesbetween goodness and good works? Following Jesus of Nazareth, she saysthat the goodness of good works--however useful they might be for avariety of puposes--vanishes as soon as the works appear in the world. She goes farther than Jesus when she says that the attempt to makegoodness appear in the world is not only fruitless in itself but is alsodestructive of the space of appearances.

We might discuss this a bit more, in time, and if you like.


Best,Jerome

28.02.06

Dear Ari,

Thanks for writing. I'm about to leave on a trip and don't have the time to respond to the many different things you say. I had no idea that the goodness of good works would prove so complicated. That in itself is interesting. First, the goodness of good works is not comparable in any way to evil and evil deeds.Second, it is the pure, transcendent quality or idea of goodness (thus Jesus says: Why do you call me good? God alone is good) that cannot appear in the phenomenal world. In one sense that is a tautology, but it has political implications that Machiavelli, for example, saw clearly: If you turn the other cheek to him who strikes you, you unleash evil in the world. Thus he found it necessary to "teach princes how not to be good," which doesn't mean at all that he taught them to be evil--he never did that, which is a wild misinterpretation of this most subtle of Renaissance political writers. And it is thus that Hannah says: the doing of good works is destructive of the public space in which everything appears to everyone. This is where one has to begin, I believe, in discussing these matters.

Best,


Jerome

The Philosopher & The Film-Maker

... In the world of image semiotics, which beyond mere representations brings along a heavy political burden it is quite impossible to separate the world of the philosopher from that of the film-maker. That reminds of Marcuse's remarks on the rise of analytical philosophy and the struggle of the continental schools to overwrite it; it wasn't a mere struggle of philosophical schools and tendences but rather a struggle for philosophy itself, for the making of philosophy.

Having very little to inherit from traditions in my day, I affiliated to continental philosophy not only out of existential concerns (not existentialist) but as a part of a legacy which I bestowed upon myself being a guest in continental culture; for as a Jew living in the age of postmodern criticism it was the only resource available in order to save myself from the completion of the Heideggerian prophecy of "De-struction or De-structuration, to which I've returned to and fro endless times.

Being a little bit of a modernist in the Arendtian fashion I can but ponder on whether this holds any significance for me personally and for the world. Wisely Mary McCarthy phrased the struggle of continental philosophy in America already in the 70's: The philosopher in his activity realizes that he has a common world with the rest of humanity, the common world being in itself the thinking space in which he performs experiments just like the scientist in the laboratory.

If the common world isn't all that common to the philosopher as much as it is to the beggar and to the businessman then philosophy in itself is a dead enterprise with but little to offer other than scholasticism, which we've well worn out and even off from the skin of our de-traditions as they stand today. Karl Jaspers phrased it in a tantamount paradox: Philosophy must become practical and concrete without ever forgetting its origins.

And from my experience I could as well say the European film maker does share this world of the philosopher in which the metaphysical truths even when shattered (just like kitsch and romance) must be kept alive and rather less adrift in order to make space for the world of appearances to exist bodily. Yet the philosopher can't become the film maker or viceversa and that leads us to question what's become of mimesis for both.

In a sorry world like ours at times films carry a weight of reality that has been wiped out from the world, since no possible representation carries a human message if it's not actually an outward drive of an inward need that does exist down there in the world of men's affairs. Does something exist out there in the world of men that has not even a name?- Words of Hannah Arendt. The same applies to continental philosophy, it's an historically conditioned response to human needs. In the Platonic sense (which was also Lessing's) things could only be become in Athens when they would enter human discourse. Things that couldn't be discussed undoubtedly did exist, but they did not become humanized in a sense that they could elevate themselves from the world of "Ideas" and wander somewhere in between.

Contemporary film as a part of the entertainment world isn't only a form of postmodern spirituality but also a philosophical undertaking in a way that philosophy isn't, because its mimesis doesn't find an earthly place among the laymen. Film is perhaps the form of artistic expression I want to devote the most thought to. Film is that which remains untold in between the lines of the poem and the ecstasis of the philosopher. Film isn't only about politics, it is about being slightly more human.

There're only two safe ways to achieve this which are cultural, therefore artificial (we've seen how history and nature have failed us at that): The paradox and the semblance. Philosophy being the first and Film the second.

Abenteuer, Traeume Kriegs.

Trotzdem ist es ja aber so sehr ruehig,
Denn darf ich mich nicht wenn auch in Schweige, na hoeren.
Und momentan wird es nie lange darauf ankommen
In Jedem Fall wird er nicht geboren durch Zeitungen
Und niemals meine Briefe wiederauf wuerdt angewort.

Zweifellos der Kunstler lebt noch darin
Und das Alles wissen gefaellt ihm doch
Aber zu spaet geboren, oh freunde, oh Gott!
Kindes Endymion
Nach Lessing nachgeboren, und dann lustig aber gliklos
Koennte er nicht schon mit Gott anfahren
Oder denken
Vielleicht kvetchen, na
Sein reisebegletter wird gekommen
Mit einer tiefe Tasche, doch aus Prag!
Aber ware er dahin schon glaublos
Und Deutsches Bank darft das nicht vergessen.

"Credit" sagte Heine,
Noch der Lehrer korrigiert:
"La religion, la religion"
Hauptsaechlich Problem des Menschengeschlechts
Zeitlich wir haben gerne Zweifel als Glaube
Und besoneres eben... Zeitlichkeit heisst damals
"Temporalitaet"
Der die Heiddeger klaerte auf
Wir meinten "Sorgen".

Und sogar drei Stunde in Erwartung
Wurde ich jemand ganz anders bekommt
"Gewerfenheit"
Der meister sagt.

Aber noch dann wurde ich den kleines von der Gotten
Eben so wann singt meine Tasche "Jerusalem"
In einem kleines Anschlag
Wenn auch das meint
"Schwierige Frage"
Damit wusst mann machen?
Woran? Wovon?

Nach der Zeitung:
"Bureuacracy is the new form of
Despotism - one in which no one
is to blame"

Wenig traurig, und nur noch halb wahrlos
Ich trinke Jasmintee mit Efraim
Und erinnere mich ueber Grass
Als Peter nie lange schreibt ab.
Er ist nie lange.

Au-dessus de la mêlée [Romain Rolland & Herbert Marcuse]

Civilization, Madness, Eros?

As though these three words could be anyone epitaphy of death or a verbal phrase one really seems to wander slily in between those, seemly trying to find desperately a home one could call his own somewhere in between the ashes of Athens and Jerusalem, perhaps the oldest intellectual struggle from which that hermentic super-structure known as the Western world has sprung forth in order to take us over, since the very beginning of a world never old and never new. "In between past and future".

I can untie the wires without finding a fashion to recompose the painting and our whole wealth of traditions, pasts and within them our thoughts are laid bare before me in a nakedness that produces more disdain and sadness than courage of amazement. Jewishly speaking it reminds me of my conversation with Einat Ramon regarding Heschel and Bialik on the issue of Halacha and Aggadah. After my remarks on Franz Rosenzweig and Hermann Cohen (which I no longer remember) Einat pointed out that the divisions within the realm of the worldly not only no longer existed but they have never existed. As such the burdenproof is supplied by the Biblical man, in its very one world. One in which the secular and the holy were certainly not one (excluding any talk on the Ancient Near Eastern canons of law where no prescriptions for ritual practices were presented that carried a punishment upon the lack of their fulfillment), the two extremes most certainly existed and their combination is what led these men of old into their "wanderings". This insight was provided to me this evening by the legendary Jacob Chinitz.

Our problem in defining the secular realm is that we're navigating on waters that were more Aegean and Dorian than Phoenician. We're living in a world whose secular view is not the product of this formally casual dialectics that the Biblical man experienced but rather the deterministic attitude of the Classical Greek man in which he rejected all the mysteries, mocking Homer and the Pre-Socratic philosophers with their natural dogmas, even more so the Pythagoreans. This we can clearly read into the dialogues of Plato.

Harvey Cox sheds light on the problem by pointing out that the Greek world only contained space, and as long as our world is a Greek one most certainly Motzkin might have been right when he pointed out that the Marxist idea of progress in fact has no base (in an Augustinian sense coming to the same conclusions as Cox through a different perspective). Such not being the case with the Biblical man. The Hebrew man built his identity on the premise of time, and then the world instead of being empty space populated by the human race become immediately history, containing the dual dimensionality of man that my teacher Avivah has pointed towards while quoting Kafka. Cox's analysis goes way too far but I lack the tools to furnish evidence.

[damn computer crashed and what I wrote hereunder had to be redone.... angrily and with a slender and hindered muse]

It's unclear to me how well Rolland knew Heidegger, but from his biographical information I know he studied philosophy at the ENS which he later on dropped not wanting to be poisoned by the ideology of the times, ideology... such a characteristic word of the 19th century. But in his very own work it seems to me as though his "public statement" (that which every genius makes when his talents bring him to the fore of the public world) wasn't too much different from Marcuse's. Rolland must have known at least Hegel, Brentano and Husserl if not Heidegger. That same statement Marcuse made in 1945, the year when Rolland died and 3 years after the suicide of Stefan and Charlotte Zweig in Brazil. We can't attach an exclusive value to their purpose, as Rolland wasn't a Jew.

A philosopher could be deceived about political matters and then simply recognize his error- wrote Marcuse in 1945, but he couldn't be deceived about a regime that murdered six million Jews and that turned error into an everyday event. This same concern that drove Marcuse outwardly to the world of politics and Rolland inwardly to the world of literature. Both might seem today as part of the same driving force (in the post-archaic and already abstract sense) that springs forth human freedom and the quest of otherness. Rolland's interest in India might have been well different from Heidegger's contact with the Kyoto school, in which he betrayed two millenia of Western moral and metaphysical thinking, and beyond that - obliterated it for the posterity. Murderously erradicating the traditions that contained our pasts and with them our thoughts and per force our consciousness.

Marx and Heidegger might not have worked in opposite directions, but wore the same thin force of the pre-rational man, with whom the Biblical man was in itself rescinded to an other-wordly status that excluded his contingengy. Perhaps Rolland sinned in not being critical enough, and it only reminds me of Zweig's accounts of his travel in India.... clearly attacking Cox at least 40 years before "The Secular City" and moreover didn't sin anymore than Marcuse. But those are after thoughts that must be left for the posterity, for I can only clumsily pose the questions trying to follow the steps of my teacher Arendt, in a world in which it is no longer possible to "Be" in the sense that it was before this realm of dread that wiped out any possibility to de-atrophy the senses in order to come to the fore of the catastrophe and exercise our judgement. In that very realm is my distrust of Christianity and of any sort of theology that doesn't clean itself from Aristotle, but therein I'm being Heideggerian at the very top of my energies.

That's why perhaps Zweig and Rolland might have been the last "men" in the sense of Goethe, even beyond Rachel and Rousseau. Marcuse I don't trust or distrust because my opinion about the making of politics is rather ambiguous. I do not want to obliterate the metaphysical world but in my concern to do politics in order to de-estrange the world and bring it forth so that it can gain a dual dimensionality again, I do obliterate the need and importance of philosophical undertakings. Wasn't it in any case that duality what we've been attacking Hegel for? I've written in my journal already a few times that we quite didn't understand Hegel. Perhaps our misunderstanding is that of being Kantians. In that sense we have to find the truth within our earthly prison and therefore eliminate the "travail" of the Biblical man and exchange it for a rather provincial view, perhaps a little bit burgeois.

Bottom line is... there's so much to learn from Zweig.

Personal Note

I hate these personal notes, because they often turn out sort of kitschy and one doesn't know what to do with it; beyond that also being a "Lessingian" at the top of my forces I prefer to keep that silent distance between myself and the world as to make sure a world will exist even in the aftermath of thinking. My mind wanders through slies in mani-fold directions, and even when I managed to focus on the study of Greek for almost a whole day today I almost lost the continuity, yet it isn't alarming because it's still too early in the day.

Books remain open 24/7 but hardly ever completed, and it's really more of a concentration problem than one of lack of intellectual skills. The question of Being in its "thrownness" seems to be rather unavoidable for me, at the centre of all my metaphysical inquiries but the violence of this thrownness and its implications in the worldly world of Men seems to distract me even more and such as the originally intended "Dasein" I'm driven into politics in an almost animal fashion, but certainly one quite different from my teacher on ontology and anything Greek and thought of as lofty and belonging to the realms of the spiritual causes. I become a traitor.

In anycase my life's been surrounded by many different acts of betrayal, so that it couldn't even be termed theatrical anymore, even when there's plenty of that too. I don't cease reading S. Zweig and enlightening my already radically rotten views of the worlds of celebrities and intellectuals. My disdain for anything intellectual keeps growing adrift just like anything European. I seem to be in that so typically Arendtian position to support and forcefully explicate anything among whose aims there's clearly an irrational desire to anhiliate my very existence or at least to make it quite unendurable with toils that wouldn't have been too familiar to our fellow Greek citizens and Athenian "polites". The conflict of interests with Marxist underdogs doesn't seem to have changed at all, and our "analytical" words just become an echoed veil of our failure.

I'm constantly driven by my freedom into the mightiness of the Ocean, as to re-experience the world and recover it but such is the vertigo that comes with the fall that every so often I just seek refugee in those houses of security that exclude the nausea. The Feast of Fools. Those notions are irreparably connected to my whole perception of reality, the necessity to have an spiritual world, a world above... so that this one below can continue existing. This one anyway would certainly not cease to exist had we obliterated the one above, but it would be a return to the mankind of the pre-Biblical world. I don't reject the enterprise of Ontology, nor I pretend to radically take away from a world already old its traditions and heritages, because in them it contains also its pasts and willy-nilly living "Rei". I just call for a "recognition" of this Biblical world-view. I won't develop this here, it might take me some 20 years to really know what I'm talking about. In the meantime I can utmost comment on boring philosophical texts.

Just to "top" an electronic endeavour this morning. Chatting endlessly with an Israeli soldier, and observing his naked pics. Then as a typical dweller of the anti-world scheduling an appointment for base raw casual sex. I wasn't that attracted to him really, who apparently seemed all too uninteresting and unbefitting for my categories of acquaintances and midnight lovers. But the age... the damn age; he fares 21 summers which is one more than me. I don't know how to really explain this but once you get over the 20ish threshold and start counting up then you look at your body and feel you skin with a different kind of feeling, it's some sort of self-directed desire at that stage right in between your masculinity and some vestiges of childlishness and boyhood. Then you start dreaming of yourself younger as though the years would start being spared on you, it's just melodrama but it constitutes an instense sort of feeling.

In that burgueois and morally astray world one can't help but go along the lines of the human condition by thinking "not to have is the beginning of desire". That's why we all sophisticated people yearn for the fireman and the cop and the baker, notions that are an absurdity in every possible respect.

That's how I led myself into it. It's a pity because it turns my whole thinking enterprise into an arbitrary nothingsness for which one could only find counsel in Kundera. I'm really a citizen of the anti-world and unfortunately that's the only world where I've ever been at home. In my vindictive endeavour my little fighting soldier refuses to have sex in the end because I'm a so-called "Pro-Arab". I've never trusted the right-wing (in particular the Israeli with its religious affiliations) to have much intellectuality or common sense, practically I acuse them of living in a world where gut feelings and subjectivity (attacking it in a most Heideggerian fashion) equals consciousness and possibiliti-ness. I've just NEVER trusted the right-wing, and because I have some quite clear ideas about what it means to be Jewish in a wider historical context beyond "Israeli" politics I have by proxy to affiliate myself with the Left and the values of liberalism and relativism even, because I'm bound by the Biblical Relevation... the ultimate atheistic anti-churchy propaganda and relativization of values.

That was really the ridiculous top of the mountain. Plus being such a political animal and "Polis" dweller like myself I can't understand how those "provincial" types that still read Jane Austin and the Brontee's can dare to bring together their political views as an underdog for what they shove up their asses. It is quite a sorry situation because these days not only our political views decide our nationalities and exiles, but they also decide our nights out and the number of "longpigs" we can swallow per year.

This is written in a decidedly profane and rather vulgar language because one can't help the outrage before such events. "Event" in a Heideggerian fashion: Moment of Care, temporality. That's just a comment in the side with a rather cinemetographic mimesis. Funny enough Israel boils with right-wing and rather fascist queers which truly remind me of some other country a while back, but I can't tell you the name of the country. I can't write anything attacking the IDF or the Israelis or Zionism.

It's forbidden to me by my very own conscious objection. This morning I just read some sites from the American National Socialist Party and their endless links to Western newspapers and the endless accusations against this "poor" country, which isn't really any poor. I've lived here for about three years or more and I know things aren't really that pink, but one gets used to it even despite himself. Then I took a glimpse at Human Rights Watch and their disastrous anti-Israeli propaganda all signed by a very fine and well-educated American Jewish lady. Then you wonder if maybe she herself received scholarships sponsored with Saudi money at the finest American colleges and quite exceedingly profited from a "liberal" education that "obviously" isn't available to those that just sit not idly and gather more books than any college student might have ever read. They were too busy with bareback and fraternity issues such as the drinker of the week and the ass of the month. I won't see myself quoted by anybody for the purpose of polit-ichs.

My soldier friend can continue living in that ideal world of binary systems. Fortunately I've scheduled an American leftie for Saturday night. Next thing will be that somebody will refuse to bring you coffee because you believe in God or to provide you medical care because you don't wear the 2007 Mecca Gay World Pride Parade shirt. I think the Bible warned us about this a little bit, Freedom is really a form of Totalitarianism when let too much free, just like poor old Truth.

In other fronts; academia: My state of indecision is helpless.... my options are really studying philosophy with teachers I can't quite respect in a shabby university. Then there's across the sea a world of options. I've considered the following: Classics (Greek & Latin), Theology, Arabic (with Akkadian or German), Akkadian & Greek, Politics. I can't make up my mind.

Der Sinn Von Politik Ist...

One couldn't describe the feeling with enough accuracy, having grown already too experienced in the fashion of recklessly living as though the world above couldn't really exist for us anymore. That's where only Hannah has heartily turned me in some sort of an intellectual warrior who couldn't compromise for less than making this world more human, therefore much more inhabitable. Or in sight of the impossibility, at least transforming the way we think of it thereof.

In that "essentiality" I depart from the discourse of Cox, for with the total obliteration of metaphysics we've also forsaken altogether with religious and intellectual traditions and dogmas the pasts and therefore the world itself as well. I've losy my faith on the Left and refuse to embrace the Right; in all not unlike Lessing I remain critically committed to the world with the only purpose of making it more human by mere discourse. It's dangerous only in the sense that I've gained this cosmological view only from the raw experiences of history and current world affairs, but all the more realizing that by themselves alone they keep me from being able to move in any sort of invisible space I swim in the vast ocean of singled-out ideas in order to find my way around within the traditions, as to break away from this age-old dualism that so irreparably alienated us from the world as our forerunners received it.

No matter how dangerous the warfare we witness we can't let go of the study of the Classics, the Bible and the philosophers, without forgetting for a second Jasper's lesson on the philosophy of politics. It seems natural to me being driven to the public realm and world politics, not unlike Heschel would. The materialist view has turned the left into a bankrupt dialectic, we must hence strive for an existential answer for the interests of liberal politics, not unlike the Biblical prophets.

The pivotal lesson here, for which I must remain critically committed to liberalism is that for us the essence of politics isn't necessarily democracy, but freedom. Once we can no longer turn towards the Polis and the tragedies of the French Revolution still haunts us, we can't so blindly rely on democracy, social-contracts, humanism and logical positivism, all of which can already be judged as sheer fiction. Their triumph would be a loss for humanity.

Dr. Luchtins phrased it wonderfully through Hannah: The danger inherent to the French Revolution is that if all men are equal, when you're not equal it means I can kill you because you're not human. Sadly enough this is background on which the Nazi Holocausts rests, and most possibly the Arab genocide underway. The Israeli state has inherited materialistic dialects and the democracy of the French Revolution instead of Biblical humanism. What I call Anti-Humanism.

The actual lack of this freedom that is at the root of liberal politics is a turn-asides towards the human condition. All in all I'm trying to explain that as thinker I shouldn't fear the making of politics. In the current state of affairs politics is the only way back to philosophy, since we're almost unable to think of heaven at all no more, and with the obliteration of the world above we forsake any possible way to enter back the human world. The way of "politics" was perhaps somewhere hovering on us since Nietzche and in his denial of Aristotelian metaphysics only Heidegger bequested us this rebellion as a testament, that becomes second in importance to no other idea of the 20th century because we're talking about the same man who in its escape from Aristotle returned the most inhumaine form of Ontology with all the political implications it had for being-thereness-in-the-world. We learn from the brilliancy of his mistakes and his potential crimes, as Arendt and Jaspers would put it.

Dwelling exclusively on the metaphysical before the dismise of the human, is a deliberate choice to suspend judgement and deliver it to Man, not to men and therefore to surrender to the fallacy of ethics on an entirely otherwordly ground. That of ontology and so wholly alienated from that "place of dwelling" we're so forcefully attempting to recover.

But how can we recover it when our thinking space has disappeared by vanishing into the category of mythology with all our gods, traditions and histories? We're unable to think (unable to move in invisible spaces) and since our traditions have remained shattered for a long time we can no more move beyond the limitations imposed by nature, henceforth by means of "reason" as our only ally we've obliterated both worlds -the one above and the one below, with all the spaces in between humans that they contained. Diminishing to an unworthy status the quintessence of the human condition - the earth.

We're returned to a pre-rational world, that same world that Biblical revelation aimed to correct. Then moreover if the quest for human meaning is a denial of human freedom it is requiring from us a backwards travail from Greek questions towards (and within) a world that has separated men by means of politics, not exclusively of democracy. A turn towards a world that is both history and space, for an eternal world is certainly a harvest for questions of whatness and thisness (amazement) that do not systematically lead to judgement as the end of a syllogism (the idea of Leibniz). The questions are politically impractical; an eternal world doesn't see the sheer need for memory.

While it's true that the world of history (by necessity separated from nature) can't find a home without a Polis, this can't be a city of deities; citizens must be the dwellers of this space, citizens for whom history goes beyond divine origin into striving. But if the Gods are all dead as well, in order to "judge" anything at all we need to bring them back from their graves, because no practical solutions for the concern of the Polis are to be found wherenever the possibility for speculation (secularly speaking) has vanished.

To conclude a remark from Hannah's study of Augustine: The central idea of humanity is not expectation, but memory, without which the former is no longer possible. A static world is that of the Kantian mind, certainly eternal and unable to move, therefore not human enough and impaired for judgement, because memory is not contigent in a world that has always existed. The very same thinking at the root of that age-old Western problem of history that brought about the 19th century obsession with ideology and history (dialectically juxtaposed), replaced by the 20th century concern for revisionism of that same history. The consequence of rooting anything human artificially on reason, which isn't to be found in neither world above or below.

Judgment isn't based on reason, but on thinking (and experiences of willing) that are quite not the same. Thinking in actuality is the permanent updating of representation, the sin of reason is inertia. Reason suspends judgment in its radical loss of the world. Thinking does save the earth and with it the human condition, but on the condition of thinking our actions. Not when it suspends them to a realm of arbitrariness, alienating the two dimensions of man from one another and vanquishing the distinction between good and evil (atrophy of the senses) by a sacralization of politics and equality and justice that the Biblical weltanschauung tried to correct but using the elements available in the pre-rational world, rather than thiking from a vacuum whereby no living creature has dwelt but force, that "movement" the Pre-Socratics failed at distinguishing and remained condemned to their earthly prison. The problem was first solved by the travailing of Abraham with God's dream and designs (man was a partner in creation), breaking away from the inertia of nature.

16:01

Feeling a little bit hindered
Chasing myself out of a hidding place
That stands amidst Thy tents
Oh Jacob
In downtown Jerusalem
Feeling cherished
By the madness of these happy mornings
That pick up human bodies
From the imagination of the papers
And deliver them to the bad guys
Just like in elementary school.

I no longer drink coffee
Or truth is the coffee always remained undrunk
Whereas now it drinks itself to the imagination
And reminds me of being some sort of animal
Hunting my prey
Haunting in this world of men
A warrior born in a metal-cage
That knew no other villains
Than thinkers and beautiful men.

It doesn't look like a Polis
But at least we happen to talk about it lots
That's what makes this shithole
More human than political
One of the most beautiful places
For dust recollection.

Anything can be collected
Nothing can be recycled
Prohibited
Or Repeated
Not even the stone in your shoe
The one that makes you stumble
Anytime you find another one of your gender
As not even Jerusalem
Can free you from the prison of you being not somebody else.

I feel a little mad today
Even slightly illegal
But it's a good feeling
It glows so painfully
Till I vanish
Till I perish
In morningness
And awake by night
To engage in conversations
To remember,
Perhaps even to hope.

I feel a little mad today
Even slightly anarchic
But it's a good feeling
It glows radically
Till I love it
Till I die it
Till we rain in.

Women in Black Today

For a change, after the long and quite short-lived evening (and partly morning) I spent with Rashid I had to find myself facing the world of human-dwellers and citizens, that "City" for so long already betrayed and misused, in many different names. I walked back home entirely drunk in the pleasures of empathy, as though that phenomenal empty space in between my body and my "Geist" suddenly dissipated and both could touch one another as I transformed the energy of the world by my motion and as such imitated God even a little bit.

In the summer days (which are many!) I love the earliest mornings, the fresh morningness that feeds little tiny slices of inspiration dripping from ballons and otherwordly-things that the pink-fingered Aurora was given by her father Zeus to entertain herself. I almost floated through the streaming pleasures of the cold morning and embraced the most serious contemptuousness in the lonely man of faith. My travailing and echoeing through the late-hours and the thoughts of other people, the images of places still unknown and poetry that no one cares to memorize and recite aloud no more. The God led me hearthwards and bequested to me some sleep of pleasure and disregard. One of those mornings when the newspaper doesn't bother with coming, and your foremost love story seems to turn into the Archimedean point of your whole life.

Then later on escaping that sinful boredom that Kierkegaard preaches me about all the time, and without entertaining much Hegelian recollection but altogether lacking the inner drive to utter my prayers after such a colorfully violent and yearning-full nightliness I was still striving for disengaging from. The sun didn't come to me with the smells of the Levant, such as those I see in the mildly nervous streets of the Arab markets in the Old City. It didn't have either the venomous and manly eau of that man who totally forgot me, nor the sweet and almost swift smell of warmth that emanated from R., it was simply a day-less morning.

On my way back just reaching for Terra Sancta College (of course I'd be gladly more interested in writing about Christian places than synagogues and that kind of anachronistic stuff) I saw them. Obviously it wasn't the first time, and for a time I used to be among the earliest attendants to our weekly silent protest against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. I didn't feel this "compulsory" sympathy for the people in the left, and I truely educated myself to love all kind of "kratos", and not necessarily the one of the "demos". Respect in which I remained so terribly faithful to the Polis. I also had a gut feeling that they had a right claim, even though I found them so morally unqualified to make the claims themselves. I couldn't help the mixed feeling of pity and empathy, one all too human. But somehow else I felt that I was also being loyal to Lessing. "In the same sense that these things are all true is the same sense in which they are all in a sense false" (Augustine).

I often questioned (since my early days in the left) whether I really had the moral right to stand up for those particular human rights that I'm collaborating in violating in many different ways. The fact that I don't hold a gun doesn't exempt me from my responsibility. I dwelled in the anti-world for long enough, in the world of celebrities, to know a thing or two about them. And we do defile human rights on a daily basis, our own even. This is a little bit of melodrama though.

Issue at stake is, being there holding a poster calling for the end of the occupation made me understand (and not for the first time) that it's not a problem of ideology or religion, it's not a problem of land or water, it's not a problem of anything but the Human Condition. That same condition the world is working so hard to escape while it sinks beneath its shadow. There's no singled-out answer for the Israeli conflict, it's really impossible to know what really goes on here in this sea of entrophy, in these marred waters. If such a thing as the truth existed here, it fled. Fled with the Palestinians, or perhaps with the Templars or the Armenians or whoever else spent a few nights in a hotel, loved an Israeli man for a day and then boarded on a plane. They took it away, and I can't blame them. Because once the truth of anything shall be given to the Israelis or the Palestinians they'll turn licentious. Only God can live the truth, if there's one.

In this lake of metaphysical tantra and mavericks it's really difficult not to suffocate from the newspapers, and even worse from regular people. We've obliterated the world to such a far off removed distant cloud that we can no longer recover the world, we can only remember it and at that with stenuous difficulties. How can you ever judge anything downhere in this earthly world which isn't rooted on the earth? How can you even dare to be a thinker before recovering the world?

It boils down to the fact that utmost we can do is to follow our guts feeling, always a good thing. Problem is when you try to save the world from estrangement with your gut feeling as an only chariot and warrior. In that sense it's tragic to realize no possible political stance is available for us here. Not for the just or for the open-minded, not for the pacifists and not for the world-haters, not for the fundamentalists and not for the secularists. We're lost the world two-fold in a sea of cheap novels and porn movies.

Our political opinions in this country are just the most homeless form of despair. Attempting to take a stance because no possibility is at all viable, but as long as we can't unearthen the source of life rooted in that mystery that surrounds anything alive and everything human.... we don't have any answers. It's all a sick comedy, and the war turns basically sexual and the press into soap operas. From Heidegger: We can only save the world through dwelling, which is in German cognate with the word for building.

...We need to find it first....

You should have been there this afternoon... the Police had to defend the protesters whereas right-wingers protested across the street glorifying the army and calling the women in black "totalitarian". People shouted curses from the cars and even twice the police had to intervene. Christians and foreigners teaming up with liberal Jews while young women called the Jews to realize they don't have any other country. Insults came and went, and there was a bitter sense of madness to it all. It wasn't a protest and it wasn't a Friday afternoon. It was a carnival, a bacanal. Everything about it was demagogic, feminist, sexual and banal. Even the fliers, even the intentions. Most of all the intentions.

Rashid

What's in a name after all I thought?
For God created man in his image
Thereafter bestowing upon him a name
With which he himself summoned him up
Once the most imporant sin in history had been committed.

Perhaps he created man merely in his shadow,
Reason for which he couldn't allow him to exist unnamed.

Hannah Arendt would say:
"Does something exist,
not in outer space
but in the world and the affairs of men on earth,
which has not even a name."

The Biblical account gives you plenty of examples in this fashion
How Abraham, Jacob and Joshua were carved into holiness
By acquiring a new name.

And then really, anything that there's in a name
Can be reduced to a phenomenological question.

I want to call you by your name
Because it reminds me you're something foreign
Something distant
And as long as you and me are no brothers
Hence not in the risk of Cain's sin
As long as you and me are only friends
Perhaps there's still a chance for the Polis
Even though the Republic fell through as it was being created
Nonetheless,
Your name reminds me that there's a space between you and me
Which keeps us from being crowded in a room
It is something that contains Christian splendor,
But with it also Christian coldness
Reason for which we do not give it a name
And leave it for the affairs of Realpolitik and professors
I particuarly like poetry
It reminds me of what being meant once.

This space between you and me
Is a sad estrangement from one another
As though we were condemned
To communicate through a little loophole
But with amazement I discover
That whenever I take a glimpse of you through the hole
There's this warm feeling which isn't Christian or civilized
This feeling imported from the Orient
Which is also you and me.

It is a sad space, no doubt
But this space is the only thing that permits us to have a world
One in which politics also dwell
She never pays the rent
And is often in quarrels with the Gods
That ask her to be less noisy
Because in their oblivion
They only want some silence.

This world that tragically
Belongs only to us
And not to some foreign power
Just like the feigned Gods
That our Age of Reason
Took pride in obliterating
And it's a rather strange place.
It's a no man's land
The mightiest of waters.

That when we dwell therein
We're already saving it
Just like we save it
When we think it
When we build it.

In a whimsical shape
A hurricane overtakes us
One yellower than hay
And we sail from home
In an almost Biblical travail
Acting out our freedoms
Realizing that they only drive us back inwardly
To build these prison houses of safety
That do not eliminate the insecurity of the mightiness
They merely exclude it.

But we do not dwell in these houses
Or in countries or schools
Not even in people's eyes
We dwell in an impossibility
We call it often the world
And it is not a logical probablity.

On account of that
I shall not want to make you my brother
Because I read the Bible
And because I shall not obliterate the memory
Remebering a world that existed before Marx
And perhaps even God received an immigration visa
Like we did
And I shall not call you with those European names
That are also yours
Because they remind me of churches
Whereas there's something too warm about you
I shall call you by your name
Fellow,
Your name is Rashid.

Discontent

Quite badly I miss modern music
Because it glows in the mouth
As one hearkens to its uncompositeness
And deals Hegel a mortal blow
For which God rejoices in encores

Modern music is the only thing I miss
From the world that isn't world
Barely could Augustine dwell therein
It's too much wordly
Cheaper than Romantic plays

I'm not bothered by antiquity
By crime, not even by the anti-semites
It only bothers me history oweing to be written down
As though it were a sin
Less than the bounds of Prometheus
And more likely an Archimedean point

But there's still point for celebration
Morningness is also at stake
And buried in the feulleton
That some weather broadcaster wrote
One that didn't know Noach

Zweig & Gilson: Remembering The World

אוונדן: פאלאצן אין די צייט

That's how a Yiddish poem of A.J. Heschel starts, and of late it seems to me as though the palace of old wanes into decay and turns rather into a painful embrace; unlike other times the evening finds me in a sad tortured tiredness... one that I prefer to conceal from thinking and other demeanours so typical of my nightly hours... the only times when I'm able to experience that spontaneous freedom of twilight, unbeknown.

Quite a beautiful day, and the quintessence of doubt. A whimsical series of momenta connected to one another only by Midrashic instrospections that betray the flesh and turn so absolutely timeless that not even the sun of Jerusalem's hot summer enables itself to remind me of such earthly reality. One would thoroughly appreciate theatre then, for then and only then the human condition seems unusually palpable and righteously graspable.

Nonetheless I did think some thoughts that came to me some weeks before. In days of old (not too old) I used to rejoice in Zweig's account of that "World of Yesterday". It seemed to me as though the world of security could have been the only possible home wherein to hide from the mightiness of the Ocean. Such a world had never been available to me and I found myself running in search of shelter for years with no end until this very day. But even so I did have a world of yesterday, one that made me feel secure about being human and in which only literature had the authority to ask questions on the quintessence of living. One could derive all possible knowledge and wisdom from the Classics, both the Greek and German... the only languages intimate enough for conversation. Often times we read also some of those books so famous from the school's yard that portrayed this violent humanity one could be so proud of.

Living in a pretty Catholic world, George Elliot had all the morality necessary in order to live a life of sin, for after all guilt was nothing but a metaphor of exclusively human goodness. One couldn't trouble less with philosophers or churches. The Bible was read too, in order to grasp a little bit of that "Zeitgeist" ever-present in the glorious history of the Western civilization. I wrote poems almost every night and sent them for oblivious lovers, who in turn only traded them for a little bit of warmth in a hue and perhaps a short line. We wrote letters all morning long and rejoiced in the earliest Martinis of intimacy and pride.

Any betrayal found us in the vein of an artist, self-delusive and irreverent only out of the conviction inherent to his condition; whilst the world couldn't prove him wrong it could neither appreciate his artistic expression. But he was content with it, because the poetry was simply a label to the youngest of bodies and the most innocent sights. Those days have remained shattered for too long, it seems to me as though they died away with those long glasses of cognac and were morning-buried in the sand, with the most incredibly intoxicating of all banal forms of pain. Then came the day to flee, the day to wander.

From place to place, as though one were a prophet receiving training in hardship as a free gift from nowhere. The living room also flet away, with any possible attestation of having been occupied before... my pasts and lovers and friends did exist at a time, but they all had betrayed me and quite unconcerned with it I would ride the train for the coast. Along the way I would write some of my last poems of the period, of rather questionable quality.

But I was then travelling by train and staring into the Ocean, protecting myself from the mightiness of the world. Never again the world would shine as in those years preceding my search for refugee. Living would become nothing but a way to remember the world.

Those days have vanished already with their faces and their flavours. When one becomes thought-of then all of this historiography carries but little meaning. But who can forget these days of new?

Not trying to be in any sense modernist, but yet enjoying the pleasures only reserved to the loftiest of souls and in the most ancient of all Western cradles still inhabited today, so ancient that even the locals became oblivious of its meaning. My history in this city disappears with the days through the raw madness of the air and the viscuous texture of the hours, one couldn't remember himself being a person no more... not anymore than we did in the days of the creation; it all started on a second day and its completion only carried fateful consequences. Every moment is but a dialectical thought that lingers about the rooves and hovers on cups of coffee that in the summer can never be drunk but to themselves.

Living in such dark times... that when people will read our history they will but understand nothing. My only advise to the future generation is to read our poems and our discussions on philosophy (not our books, they're testimonially useless because it's hardly possible to philosophize as in the days of old in a world whereby philosophers promove themselves in order to afford walking their dogs and watching erotic movies), our tax forms and our cardboards. History will not have any meaning. Once the wars will end and no more blood will run in our streets and our pens there'll be no meaning to this dwelling... because one can only save the earth and the physical location into morningness. The world can never be said by optimism, with its venomous declarations of freedom. We're saving the world from the mightiness of being, by keeping it diminished and angry, sleepy and rusty. We're saving it from meaning, and only God aids our heroic purpose.

Not other generation will dwell in Jerusalem like ours, at the crossroads of the quintessence of what being human means. At no other particular period will be Lessing so widely unread and so throughly understood and anonymously discussed. No other possible world will be so terribly modern and vexed. This city is a celebration of this inescapable quintessence. In my miser situation I became acquainted with the most progressive ideas the world could ever bear in its wombs and the loftiest of souls in the porticos of the churches, the rooves and the gardens... in the markets, the brothels, the bakeries and the magazine-stands. The halls of learning remain deserted, or rather occupied by our enemies and all those whose only purpose is to emancipate man from barbarism. While it still demands silently to be emancipated from humanity, from emancipation, from progressivism, from history, from rationality.

Never before in history had God been so lonely, never before God needed to have a history in order to afford his rent at the heavenly dwellings whose ownership he traded for reason. A generation where God hired Aristotle and Madonna, where people like Edith Stein and Thomas Aquinas would become irrelevant to discourse. People are thirsty for a truth that is opposed to falsehood.

Shall God grant me one day to un-live this city and this generation without enduring the fate of Adam, but rather the faith of Noach. I want to sail away in the mightiness of the primal waters far away from here. One day I'll escape this quintessential prison. One day. In the meantime only with Zweig and Gilson one can remember the world. The news continue to shatter the way we communicate. The truth of logic only shatters human discourse. Never before wanted people to engage in discourse as much as today. The justest of all possible world, the most free of all possible words. A silly world, a dehumanized kind of thinking. For that only reason one should continue to philophize amidst the bombs and the parades and the demagogies of the internet: In order to remember the world. An anti-world has taken over. Remembering the world is biblical theology, is building those palaces in time... it is telling Midrash while one altogether weeps and celebrates the irrational. It's living from nightness to morningness and awakefulness to prayers and odes, lyrical hymns and tawdry ballads. It is forgetting history, not the history of humans but of beings.

History of humans is the foundational stone of the anti-world, the most un-existential of all possible dwellings. Humans were replaced by statistics, God by lying hatred.

לא

כאשר השחר בשטח

כואב לי כוכב בבטן

ובטוח גם ספר ארוך

שאישרתי בבית

כאשר יצאתי לחפש אלילים

ומצאתי בכי כמעט טרגי

שאינו תנכ"י אבל

אלא קצת מטושטש

מאגירים בעולם

ללא אישור מוכר

נודדים ביער

שבו נמצא עיר גדולה

ובה אין אורים

אלא אנשים

שקוצים מהגג

איך כואב להם

שהם כבר לא אנושים

אלא אלילים עירונים

בפנים יפות

שקונים כל אשה

שמוכרים את עצמם

לדעתם של הסרטים

המחנכים של ימינו

מפגר

אני אומר לעצמי

דור מפגר

שותה קפה

מכין צורעס

ולא מדבר

שכחתי כבר

כל אלו מילים

שהיו חשובים

אבל

אבל מה

משקר העולם

אני מתעייף קצת

עזוב

אין כרגע שירה

סתם יומן של זכרונות

שאינם מדוברים

שאינם