More Epithets and Apothegms

MELANCHOLY MUSING ON THE MEANING OF HISTORY

§  I read the history of Europe on the eve of the Holocaust, thinking as I do, such and such happened ten years, five years before I was born, and then three and two; and suddenly, that was on the day before I was born, and here is an incident when I was probably already crawling or walking or asking questions.  Had I been born over there, in the Old Country, probably I would not be here now.  Had my grandparents decided to leave the world of pogroms and persecutions fifty years before then, my parents would never have met, and their lives, like so many millions of others, been extinguished in grief, humiliation and pain.  Each moment of recognition that I could have been in such and such a place when some catastrophe unfolded and at such and such time and yet have been oblivious to all the suffering is now unbearable.  All this drives me to study harder and to try to picture what it was impossible then for me to know.

§  There were once so many old friends of the family, relatives and neighbours, now most of their names are forgotten, photographs cannot be identified, and online searches fail to show any details, if any at all.  The whole world that filled up my life back then is mostly gone. In a short while, even that little will disappear.   Can the huge gap be filled by the imagination?

§  Books come together in strange and exciting, often unexpected ways.  One author deliberately or inadvertently goes over the same journey as another, discovers the same ideas lurking in the landscape and among the people he meets, though the lapse in time may be several generations.  Another book meditates on a problem that has been worked out under very different circumstances by a previous author, and mere force of juxtaposition opens up new ways to examine life and history.  In still others, writers argue with one another, answering the previous text, occupying the territory used as a novel’s setting, taking over the other’s characters and recreating them in new contexts.  In other words, it is not enough to read one book on its own, or to see clusters of books forming a context for one another, or establishing chains of connectivity over long periods of time and criss-crossing each other’s paths with illuminating insights: we have to see ourselves as part of this matrix of inter-inanimation, and then imagine our parents, our friends, our communities within similar models of history.  We are never alone, even if for the moment—lasting many generations—we have forgotten this essential truth.

§  Jokes, wit and comedy can prove to be useful approaches to problems that are otherwise irresolvable, although these resolutions to impasses and gaps in knowledge and emotional energy may be self-destructive and harmful to others.  Seriousness and arrogance, however, more often do more than exacerbate the problems; in missing the point of a tragic situation, they destroy the very elements that can be salvaged as helpful relics and reminders of what has been lost, transformed into positive features by simple or complicated processes of polishing and redefinition and integrated into a more salutary experience that is strong enough to encompass past losses and misunderstandings.  Irony, in other wor4ds, can work in several ways: not only by saying or saying that which is harmful and corrective in outright invective or more subtle satire, but by modifying or breaching the walls of indifference through a modification of the seemingly intransient barrier of insult and injury allowing sometimes for compromise and amelioration. 

§  Sometimes it seems as though the whole world is tilting, sliding and collapsing into itself, those moments we remember always as so important that nothing on the previous side of our thoughts can ever be reconstructed in the same old way, and in which rugged pathways have to be negotiated before we reach a point from which everything starts to make sense again.  We find the bits and pieces, the dribs and drabs, the fragments that were held very dear but now seem meaningless or infantile.  We might put them in an album of pointless souvenirs or a cabinet of curiosities, and then, in a dozen years or a century, someone will see them and form a pattern, claim to see a collage or a prophetic dream.  But anyone who was once there and has now forgotten will know that all the essentials are gone and the rhythms are fortuitous.

§  Speaking of earthquakes, I have been in a few big ones and they are scary—or funny, depending on your outlook.  Once at night in Saint Louis, Missouri the bathtub started sloshing about and I was sure it would carry out down the street and into the Mississippi River in my glorious deshabile.  Then there was a time in Israel when suddenly every tree swished and every bird rose up in a vast noisy  cloud as the building slowly shook back and forth.  It was so fascinating we forgot to hide under a table or in an archway.  

§  Every thirty or forty years, the river starts to go down, the reservoirs upstream are closed, and one can see almost a whole dry bed.  Around the bridges, what you will expect—bicycles, prams, shopping carts and a whole load of unrecognizable rubbish, metal and organic, corroded into sludge.  Perhaps there are skeletons of dogs and cats or fragments of other life forms, but you would have to poke around in the mud.  Further along, the smell isn’t too bad, except for rotting bushes and river weeds, where the ducks used to nest.  No fish, of course.  Turtles and frogs have long since gone.  Only memories remain, hidden under the surface, like a Golem, waiting  to be revived when the next catastrophe appears. 

§  There are times when life shows itself to be precarious and teetering on the rim of its own demise.  We have already once or twice come right up to the precipice, looked down, and, feeling a little dizzy, waited for some not so strong wind to push us over.  Later, on a dark, rainy evening, hardly able to see the road, another vehicle loudly slid past, and between the screech and the silence, one simply waited for what is inevitable to come, and the waiting was itself painful and eventually humiliating.  Then not too long ago, pieces of time fell out of consciousness, empty spaces of silence and invisibility, and though each had only been intermittent, a few moments, an hour or two, it is now evident that sooner or later the veil will come down, thick and heavy, with no breeze to blow it away. 

§  Hallucinations came for many days, and were retold as myths over the next few years, and then after so many generations no one could them rationalized into ideologies.  Then as philosophers picked apart the ideas, they made a system which everyone could believe, and things left over were preserved as decorations.  At this point, some scientists scrutinized the images, put them to the test, and, finding one or two made sense, decided that long ago what everyone believed was true.  The ideas were allegorized to make better sense, and thus everyone was very happy.  Except Jonah who tried to run away and Job who never stopped arguing, and even Esther who learned to do the job all by herself that no one else was willing or able to do.  Do you see what I mean?

Sayings for November

PECULIAR APHORISMS and PSEUDO-PROVERBS

In this age of deceit and dissonance, the only hope is to find someone who cares enough to dissent and desist.  Otherwise there is neither hope nor trust.

*

When the troubles began, I planted many seeds on the window sill, watered them, and watched them break out towards the sun.  The time would come, soon, for setting them out in the garden, and waiting for the vegetables to mature.  But the troubles continued.  I could not face the normal rhythms of nature.  Now the soil is dry.

*

Someone tells a story, and goes on and on.  Everyone falls asleep.  When we awake, he is still speaking. The next time we awaken, he is gone.  “What was he going on about?”  Everyone shrugs.  It is not true, then, that a well-told tale grabs our attention and takes our consciousness to new heights.  “What’s that you said?”

*

We thought, if you got to know your enemy and were patient, it would either pass or we would learn to live with it.  But they and we and it have lost all distinction and you are beyond understanding. Clouds dissolve into the sunset, colours drain away, sleep covers over the will to think.

*

Someday all these youngsters with strange names and misspelt versions of traditional names will grow old and they will sit around in the retirement village, tired and grey, gossiping and swapping reminiscences, and no one will realize how ridiculous they sound when they speak to one another by name. 

*

The rain falls perpendicular in heavy, long cables, as the French say. The sun cuts across in a horizontal swathe, blindingly, as though to intimidate us.  This is as much as anyone can take.  “As if I cared.” 

*

If Heidegger were a hedgehog, we would never understand him.  If Nietzsche found his niche in history, would we care?  Swedenborg and Kierkegaard could never be friends for all they shared of northern gloom.  Ludwig Wittgenstein almost poked Karl Popper with a poker. 

*

He is sixteen.  He watches children’s television and sees the propaganda.  He goes outside, walks to the road, sees a woman, stabs her as she stands with her daughters.  He goes home, notices blood on his shirt, wonders what that is.  Then he sits on the couch with his parents and looks at a movie.  The police arrive and everyone is surprized.  Verdict: This young man has “issues”.

*

It was against my principles to read diaries, letters, memoires, biographies and other personal writings.  Authors should be known by their art—poetry, novels, plays, essays.  I avoided studying anyone whose life overtook his or her literary achievement, whose life seemed to be mere gossip.  So mostly what was avoided were the texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Then things changed.  I grew old. Life is too precious to be skipped over and the memory of rumours and gossip is the stuff of reality.  It may be too late to catch up on all I missed, but most of all, I missed most of my own life.

*

In the early decades nineteenth century there were complaints that with steam engines, telegraph messages and a plethora of daily newspapers, the new generation would be growing up with an information overload, unable to digest everything that impinged on their insecure lives.  By the end of that century, telephones, motor cars and cinema threatened the intelligence of civilized nations. Soon there would be wireless voices and flying machines, electric iceboxes and bread-slicing machines. Is there no end to this madness?

*

There are four categories of traditional communication: (1) exclamations and designations by word of mouth; (2) poetic utterances of metaphoric and metonymic truth; (3) rhetorical patterns of emotional stimulation and soothing; (4) notes and pictures magnetized to the refrigerator door.

*

It is said that within a very few years, no high school or university students will have been born in the twentieth century.  Already there are many who cannot remember a childhood without television, and soon those who cannot imagine life without computers and mobile phones.  Popular culture has eclipsed the fine arts and classical music.  I myself gave up and withdrew from the world in 1953 after the rock’n’roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount with Alan Freed who pounded on a telephone book for the Big Beat.  From that moment on, in my budding adolescent heart, I knew civilization was doomed.  Yet for years I kept (though never played) the free 45-recording of “Greasy Spoon”. 

*

Nevertheless and notwithstanding, we have to deal with unpalatable truths.  Like the naïve traveller who wanders through the forest searching for mushrooms without knowing which are poisonous or not, if we have no authorities we can trust, how much dare we taste in experiment?  One thing for sure, however, we have learned elsewhere, that alluring appearance and pleasant smell cannot be our guide. 

***

Poem for early November

Earthquakes

Not Kierkegaard’s earthquakes, metaphorical,

Nor Lisbon’s ingenious conceit of Catholic sin,

Nor Lima’s premonitions of the world’s spherical

Demise, spinning out of control, veins of tin

And silver colliding from one end of the globe to another;

Nor this year’s Italian tremblings, tremor after tremor,

Lamentations of disorder, seismograph

No internal eye could ever photograph,

Disingenuous monitoring of tectonic plates,

As though we teetered on rust encrusted skates

And gathered in the rubble-strewn squares and plazas, nuns

And invalids, firemen and visual journalists, while suns

Do cartwheels in the mountains and siren puns

Elucidate the crunching of the fault-lines

Into a poetry of fossil creatures without spines

Who now emerge from deep within the lava

Caverns and shake their tentacles—we have a

Situation on this planet from tsunamis in the north

To melting icecaps in the south.  To go forth

As though the spiritual world and the moral mind

Are as they were in Søren’s time, or with Voltaire’s kind

Of rational certainties is now patently absurd;

We flee the fissures, the fractures and the fatuous word.

Piques and Kvetches

On the Fatuity of Professional Whinging

Every now and then something piques my professional soul.  It either happens to me when I read an essay that talks about things I wrote about a long time ago as though the author were the first person in the world to broach the topic or to find some new detail worth discussing.  After searching the footnotes and bibliographical references and not finding my name at all, I trace the little hollow feeling in my stomach when it turns to a lump of disgust; then it passes away, not completely—it has happened too often to let it fester—but sufficient to make me alert for the next instance. 

This same feeling comes back when the months and then the years go by after a book of mine has been published and there are no reviews, or there are one or two and they seem to miss the point altogether: such as someone who accuses me of being a post-modernist and therefore obviously of having no sense of humour, when the text they are supposedly dealing with is long witty exposition of a problem unsolvable by post-modernist jargon and conceptual formulæ, with my title proclaiming the joke for all to see, and then a series of long footnotes explaining, as one ought not to have to do, how the Witz works.  Or when someone rants on about some trivial typographical error, misspelled word or infelicitous phrase in translation, but never puts the argument in context or sees the interwoven process of midrashic explication.

Too often I find authors and their publishers claiming to be dealing with subjects for the first time when in fact my own work has long preceded theirs. sometimes by decades.  They may have different views, occasionally access to information unavailable to me, and perhaps better arguments: however, they are not the first or the only ones, and as proper scholars it is their job to be aware of what has gone before and then to indicate why they are going back over the old turf.

I know exactly why these scholars skip over my work—books and articles or edited collections.  (1) I am not there (wherever "there" may be, in Europe, North America or in Israel) so have no prestige or influence to be dealt with.  (2) My work has often been published in "obscure" journals or by "little" publishers, and yet these are relative terms and it only means that any "literature search" has been sloppy and incomplete.  (3) I have not toed the party line, whether of some supposed political correctness or of traditional protocols; and yet, in a significant number of instances, what the "established" academic writes is really no more than I have, some sometimes misses key points I made which are still valid after 20 or 30 years. 

Of course, to complain is to be a crank, to prove my lack of professional seriousness, and to confirm the futility of any endeavour to correct the fault.  Sometimes I have written lengthy  reviews of the books that neglect my work, but these comments have been neglected—one might as well flush the argument down the drain.  Sometimes I have tried to contact the author and ask what is going on, but there is neither no response or some temporizing or fatuous comment that we could discuss this somewhere or other beyond my ability to travel—my flying days are over. 

So I am speaking to you, my dear reader or perhaps readers, however many of you there are that for some reason or other look into my blog.