A Sackful of Sayings No. 8

After nearly half a century, my colleagues still would nod and wish me Happy Christmas, or look uncomprehendingly when I wished them a Shana Tova for the new year.  I live in exile from the Exile, and thus have to remind my enemies to include me, please, when they call for the destruction of Israel and the Jews.

It is said there are people in this land the authorities cannot account for.  They evade the regulations of the shire, the taxes of the state, the conventions of the commonwealth.  The bush fires tell a different story.

Sometimes I put a book or article into the hands of a friend.  He looked blankly at my face.  He could not understand what it is I had done.  He turned the object over, then handed it back, as though it were an unwanted sandwich or children’s toy.  He was very much surprised later to find out I wrote a study that was published but never asked what it was about.  My reputation is secure.

Out to Manly by ferry, crowded on a sunny day, strolling along the beach, where a gallery displays yesterday’s memories of the future: pretentious and derivative, as if bad taste and meaningless activity were all we had ever to look forward to.  Meanwhile, children are paddling and digging in the sand, playing the same old games as ever.

Four Impossible Things I Have Seen

§  While I was alive, an infant and a toddler, the Holocaust took place; and though it happened out of my sight and beyond my capacity to understand, it was no myth, was real in its enormity and beyond all precedent and expectations.  I look at the photographs of children to see if I am there.

§  The end of the Cold War, symbolized by flags with their hammer and sickle cut out, fluttered from the Convention Centre in Ottawa, where the Warsaw Pact dissolved itself.       I walked by every morning to make sure it was no dream.

§  A man walked on the moon, a sheep was cloned, and the genetic code was cracked.  Despite the nay-sayers and the cynics, the age of science had firmly been proved and established.

§ On the morning 9/11, when the full extent of the attacks on the United States became clear and the clash of civilizations—civilization versus barbarism and fanatical ignorance—proved to be reality, I began to doubt everything. 

Mezuzzah.What does it mean?  It turns on the doorpost of the house, an axis mundi, on the pivotal point of eternity.  It slants upwards, as it spins like a dreydle around the place that is always disappearing into infinity, Eyn Sof.  Marked by the shin (ש) of ultimate power (shaddai), it creates and uncreates the hearth, the heart and the health of the universe. 

 Every year we meet like clockwork with same old tics.

 Flowers and insects evolve to support one another.  Birds establish the limits of the river’s flow, and panthers guard the borderlands of winter snow.  The wonder, however, is that humans defined the rules of hunting and made wild pigs grovel before them.  No one noticed when wolves became the real masters of the tribe.

 Like the picture on a television screen that breaks up when the signals cross through a lightning storm, so my memories fissure when the muscles in my joints give way.

 Cumbersome as they might seem, the rule of grammar, the rule of law and the rule of thumb are necessary to maintain the decency we expect in life. 

Each kind of knowledge presupposes dexterity and patience, more than imagination and wit.  Otherwise worlds spin out of control and career to the centre of the black hole of persiflage.

  

Criminality is easily mistaken for constitutional subtlety.

The hands-on approach is a form of political manipulation.  Chiropractors and magicians master the craft, teachers lose touch with theory and history. 

Aesthetics has slipped from digital art to finger painting.

The next generation of scholars, unable to pronounce foreign names and blundering through chronologies, is herded, coddled and nurtured into their own competency.  Somehow in twenty years they will stand in wonder and wonder at the ignorance of young folk.  By then it is too late.

Unsure of themselves, these young students, dedicated to their theses, having begun to train themselves in languages and customs of the past, puzzling over philosophical problems outside their own experience, attempt hesitantly to see into world upon world of tradition. Ruthlessly cut away and destroyed by their own ancestors.  And while they often speak with the tongues of foolishness and use the jargon of political correctness, already they have broken the moorings, cast themselves adrift, and sail towards ancient goals—armed with weapons they have not yet learned to use.  Perhaps the right winds will blow, and maybe they will cross the stormy horizon where ancient rocks clash, and discover peaceful seas and fertile lands where most of us have forgotten how to hope. 

Modernity, having worn itself out and post-modernism proved a piffle of noxious gases, can we, who are older and approaching the end of our own strength, begin to see a future after all?

Good conversations, talks, visits to museums, galleries and book shops, amidst bouts of pains, anxiety and trepidation.  Then fine food in abundance, classic wines, and comfortable settings.  I keep waiting for the dream to end.

How to be Recognized as a Successful and Influential Artist

§  Have a miserable childhood.

§  Hate your parents for being cruel, abusive and bourgeois.

§  Believe in your own greatness.

§  Tell everyone your feeble talents are inspired insights.

§  Insult everyone around you.

§  Make fun of traditional and academic values.

§  Find other drunken, drug-taking egotistical maniacs like yourself, meet in dark places, and call yourself a School.

§  Simply be yourself, or someone else you don’t like.