Here I Am

I found a new poet today: Cheryl Dumesnil. I was absentmindedly flipping through one of those book catalogues that usually sit, collecting dust, in faculty mailboxes. I read a poem called "If," and it began with an epigraph from Rumi: "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."

Then all I have to do is

recognize her, lifting

groceries from a cart into

the trunk of her car or

pulling a muddied garden glove

from her hand as I bike

slowly by. That

simple: a cherry branch

shimmers on puddled

water, and fire torches up

within, after so much rain.

As it turns out, revelation is perhaps nothing more than recognition. A woman meets a man one day--a brief encounter. She experiences recognition. That simple. When she goes home to her lover she knows that she will never be able to touch him again. Without realizing it, she has said: hineni. She has intimated her understanding of the place she has been all along. Here I am. She slides right back into her life, as if she had never gone missing.

Pull Me Out Alive

Yesterday I had to write a brief essay on Michael Chabon for a larger project, and in doing a bit of research I found a 2008 essay of his in The New Yorker, which I remember reading when it came out. Chabon is an escape artist, an artist of escape, and perhaps even a philosopher of sorts, whose stories teach us that we can escape perhaps only when we realize that we cannot. He recounts the following story from a religious-school class called Jewish Ethics:

The one time I felt my soul to be in danger was the Sunday Mr. Spector raised the ethical problem of escapism, particularly as it was experienced in the form of comic books. That day, we started off with a fine story about a boy who loved Superman so much that he tied a red towel around his neck, climbed up to the roof of his house, and, with a cry of "UP, up, and away," leaped to his death. There was known to have been such a boy, Mr. Spector informed us--at least one verifiable boy, so enraptured and so betrayed by the false dream of Superman that it killed him.

But if escape and escapism are problems of the ethical realm, Chabon has no problem engaging with ethical dilemmas, brandishing his knack for storytelling and impulse toward mystery. And, anyway, it was not about escape, Chabon wanted to tell his teacher; it was about transformation.

I think there is a cultural need for this kind of fantasy, this longing to throw a make-shift red cape about our shoulders and be magically transformed. No doubt Linus Steinman, the mute 9-year-old boy in Chabon's The Final Solution who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his only companion, an African gray parrot, would have experienced this very same longing.

I remember back in 2004, browsing an old bookstore in Seattle with a friend. I noticed my friend, a child of survivors, gripping a book with a giant parrot on the cover, staring intently at it (I didn't realize it was Chabon's new book), as if he planned to use it as a weapon of some sort. "What are you doing to the parrot book?" I asked.

My friend, who had a flair for the dramatic, said, "Michael Chabon gets it. He gets it." When I finally read The Final Solution, I realized what he meant. Devoid of the standard, even stereotypical, images of corpses, crematoria, and barbed wire, it's the unlikeliest of Holocaust novels. In fact, it's not even mentioned, but for a few oblique but well-placed allusions to the disaster. We don't ask "why?" in relation to the Holocaust. Instead, we are fixated on who has stolen the boy's parrot and why. In Auschwitz, there is no why, and often, in talking about things that cannot be explained, we run the risk of trivializing or sensationalizing them. Chabon, it seems, gets it.

Our current position in history has placed us in the wake of so many terrors and tragedies of all kinds. And I think that, for this reason, we experience a collective longing to be saved, and to see others be saved, imagining ourselves in turn as savior or saved. Chabon's fiction taps into these needs. There are some events from which we cannot escape, but also from which we cannot help but long to be rescued. Chabon's characters come alive for us because they mirror our own secret desires for fantasy--or, perhaps it is reality that we long for, as an escape from the era in which we stand, an era that feels more like fantasy than reality.

And one more possibility: perhaps, in the so-called real world, in our world, novelists and storytellers are the ones who wear the metaphorical red capes. Perhaps storytellers alone possess the ability to transform us all. Chabon writes: "Now the time has come to propose, or confront, a fundamental truth: like the being who wears it, the superhero costume is, by definition, and impossible object. It cannot exist." But if it can't exist, it's only because our need for it to exist depends on public amnesia, a disavowal of a history in which there have been no cosmic superheroes--only the deafening sound of silence. Perhaps it is literature that has the power and potential to obliterate the desire for the costume. For without the costume, what is revealed instead is the "truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story's recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself."

Cracks in Everything

Some people never stop reading. It's true. A man puts a book down, closes his eyes, and reads. He opens them again, and reads the arch in his girlfriend's eyebrow, the way she abruptly flicks her wrist as she tosses away the cigarette he can't stand, the way she then closes her own eyes, pretending that she, too, reads. But whereas he has learned to read the darkness against his own closed lids, she sees only a bright flash of light, the backside of her eyelashes feathering across the shadow of a page.

Why do we read? Maurice Blanchot writes:

Apparently we only read because the writing is already there, laid out before our eyes. Apparently. But the first person who ever wrote, who cut into stone and wood under ancient skies, was far from responding to the demands of a view that required a reference point and gave it meaning, changed all relations between seeing and the visible.

"Apparently," says Blanchot. It is only apparent(ly). Magicians--oh, and those people on stain remover commercials--are famous for taunting us with "now you see it, now you don't." Those who deal in either magic or marketing knowingly capitalize on our weakness: our tendency to believe that what see exists, and that what we don't...doesn't. But what if we try to catch the il y a-- the "there is"--on its way from seen to unseen? How do we read what happens in between concealment and revelation?

Blanchot isn't finished:

What he left behind him was not something more, something added to other things; it was not even something less--a subtraction of matter, a hollow in the relation to the relief. Then what was it? A hole in the universe: nothing that was visible, nothing that was invisible. I suppose the first reader was engulfed by that non-absent absence, but without knowing anything about it, and there was no second reader because reading, from then on understood to be the vision of an immediately visible--that is, intelligible--presence, was affirmed for the very purpose of making this disappearance into the absence of the book impossible.

Reading is (only) a "vision of an immediately visible." When we read, really read, we disappear into the absence of the book. When we read others--the face of a loved one, the scowl of a stranger, the back of a former lover--we disappear into their cracks and everything becomes illuminated for us. I suppose this is why I look for fractures: I want to know what it feels like to be suspended, darkly, in between wholeness and fragmentation. What is dark within a person does not discredit him.

A friend sent me one of his poems today, and the idea contained in the poem is what led me down this path. The poem draws on some of Leonard Cohen's lyrics: "There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." The crack is what divides the seen from the unseen, the visible from the invisible. But how to read it is the most difficult question of all.

We Should Be Blind

Despite countless looming deadlines for various projects, I decided to do two things this evening. First, I took my dog Eliot for a night-time walk down to the ocean. And when I got home, I decided to pull all of the "books I don't often reach for" out of their hiding places and re-organize them. It was Rilke, of course, that brought both of these moments together.

There was something so strange about the air and the sky tonight, about how they seemed to separate from one another in the wind. I walked, walked, and walked down to the water. I dragged my poor dog who was scared and wanted to go home. I listened to Lykke Li on my ipod and tried to ignore him, throwing my head back in exasperation at one point. And when I did, there was the sky, in a moment at which I felt both warm and cold air swirling about inside each other, intertwining but refusing to intersect.

On this particular street in my neighborhood, there is a ridiculous number of palm trees. And as I faced upward, looking at their branches against the sky, and feeling winds of conflicting temperatures, I felt a bit of vertigo. And then a bit of something else. It felt nothing like Santa Monica. Instead, I experienced physically the memory of being, long ago, on Miami Beach--alone in the middle of the night. Walking, walking, walking. And waking. It was something about the wind, the dark sky, and the colliding temperatures.

But it wasn't my memory I was experiencing tonight. While I've been to Miami a number of times, I've never walked that beach alone in the middle of the night. And it occurred to me that perhaps I had stolen someone else's memory.

I reached the sand. I chose not to go all the way to the water. I turned around and walked home, still dragging my disgruntled little white dog. But my skin felt alive, crawling with energy and excitement.

I'm pushing stacks and piles of books around when I get home. I'd forgotten I owned a Margaret Fuller book. I flipped through the book until I found "Leila," and then turned away. I once gave a talk on "Leila" in Philadelphia, attempting to bring Fuller into dialogue with Blanchot and Levinas, the ones I really wanted to talk about. And then I saw Rilke--my favorite copy with the German and English translation side-by-side. I read "Blind Man":

Watch him make lacunae in the town,
Which his wandering presence makes unseen,
Like a crack of blackness wavering down
Through a shining cup. As on a screen,

World reflected paints itself on him,
But is not admitted to his core.
Sensing only stirs as from a slim
Catch of world in ripples on his shore:

Now a light resistance, now a calm--
Then he pauses (seeming to decide
On some choice) and raptly lifts his arm,
Almost festivelyk, as to his bride.


The word "lacunae" caught my eye, of course. Here we have a blind man creating (or illuminating?) gaps in the space in which he wanders. He's taking something right out of the air, breathing it in and leaving lacunae in its wake. He's stealing memories, I thought to myself, and leaving the town unseen. And yet, he is blind. We should all be so fortunate.

Body Lines

I once overheard a woman crying in a crowded cafe. Something about the texture of her sorrow chilled me inside and out. I remember being physically cold the rest of the evening, unable to get warm despite my piling on of layers. Her voice was filled with horror and regret.

I listened as she told the story of her love affair.

The first morning I awoke in his arms, I pretended to sleep. I silently watched his body lengthen and slide out of the bed we had shared. He, facing away, body unveiled, stretching his arms to the sky, bending them at the wrist. And then he bent forward at the waist and I saw them. I saw the lines on his body. I had never seen anything like them--countless raised, dark lines, stretchmarks of some sort, wrapping themselves around his lower back like rings in the center of a tree trunk. I was terrified by their undulating pattern. But he was flawed, and it made me care for him. If only I had read those lines more closely...if only I had read the history of his body and soul in those lines. If only I had seen the darkness and duplicity hidden between them. If only I had read his body. I would have known that I could never love him.

She made me nervous, this woman, her sorrow and story tinged with a flair for the dramatic. But I was cold all night. And later that same night, I stared at my own body in the mirror and wondered what it had to say, what was worth reading. There isn't an answer. Perhaps what we read into the external surface of the body is just an attempt see ourselves and others according to our own desires.

But I can't help but wonder whether, sometimes, the light or darkness that is part of a man's soul becomes so intense that it begins to seep through his skin, revealing the secrets of his story to those who care to read carefully enough. Today in my Jewish American Fiction class, I told my students about Saul Bellow's tendency to create heavily detailed physical descriptions of his characters--descriptions that are often symbolic of what lies beneath the surface of their fictional skin. Perhaps his impulse is more than a literary device.

An Infinite Conversation

I just read an essay in Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility by Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, who is the Co-Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford.The title of her essay--"It Is Not for Me to Finish the Text, Yet Neither Am I Free to Desist"--jumped out at me for obvious reasons, given my own interests in the work of Emmanuel Levinas as well as in what I call the midrashic impulse. It's that whole Buberian "thou must which takes no account of the thou can" thing again.

I love things that are neverending--ideas, texts, and emotions that refuse to reveal their conclusions to us. But more importantly, I love such things because they require my active participation. I help to give them life, to make them move, thrive, and evolve.

In the essay, Fonrobert describes her first encounter with the Babylonian Talmud, when she was studying at a Protestant seminary in Berlin a number of years ago. She was, understandably, seduced by the magic of the Talmud--and, "as with any magic," she writes, "...it cannot be grasped in its totality lest it lose its hold."

But what is serious study of any text--sacred or secular--but an attempt to grasp it in its totality? We sometimes think, mistakenly, that in order to make something ours we must master every one of its twists and turns, discern and decipher every enigma and ambiguity. We long for the power and security that we believe such "knowledge" affords. Everyone wants the last word.

As I read this short essay, I found myself smiling and nodding vigorously to myself at every other paragraph. In referring to a necessary characteristic of the Talmud (and Torah), Fonrobert comments on the:

willingness of the text to remain incomplete, to forsake authority, to leave the final word unsaid; and the insistence of the text that no one, not Rabbi Akiva nor Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nassi nor Rav Ashi, and certainly no one of us--so many centuries later--will have the final world. . . The truth does not abide with any one person; it is born from the principled discussion between two or more people.

Hello, Levinas.

A person, in other words, who does nothing more than sit alone in his space and study the text alone is inevitably barred from "the truth" of the text. He is missing the crucial component that would link him back to all the text has to offer. He is missing the company and companionship--and the resulting disagreements--of learning the text among others.

Fonrobert also points out the ways in which the style and rhetoric found in the Talmud confront the rhetoric of early Christianity:

It [the truth] is born from keeping the discussion going, restaging it. And I experience this intuitive perception of the talmudic rhetoric as profoundly liberating. The Talmud gave me disagreement, dispute, and conversation where early Christian theologians gave me dogmatic claims to the truth.

As proof, Fonrobert cites pereq heleq, the eleventh chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin. Specifically, she points to a recorded dispute regarding redemption between Rav and Shmuel. She quotes:

Rav said: All the predestined dates [for redemption] have passed, and the matter [now] depends only on repentance and good deeds. But Samuel maintained: it is sufficient for a mourner to keep his [period of] mourning. ---Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 97b

As Fonrobert points out, the viewpoints of Rav and Shmuel are diametrically opposed. In other words, in terms of redemption, are works and good deeds either matter (says Rav), or they don't (Shmuel). The talmudic text, however, refuses to back either one of the viewpoints, instead granting legitimacy to the question/dispute itself, rather than the answer/solution by reminding us of earlier disagreements in the Talmud about this very thing.

"The text," suggest Fonroberts, "turns us and turns us again as we seek to find everything within it."

I love this idea of being turned by the text. I always refer to the sages' admonition to turn the text, since everything is contained within it. But what does it mean to allow ourselves to be turned by the text, simultaneously? Perhaps the argument is not so much about allowing the text to transform, but about allowing ourselves to be transformed by this idea and its enactment.

Midrash and Homeostasis

Tonight I am thinking about Midrash in a different, more terrifying way. Dynamic, constantly evolving, metonymic, defiant in the face of everything that says you must stay as you are--it is in flux. It looks ahead to the future, pulling with it all of the remnants of the past that make it what it is. The product appears silly when seen in the context of the gyrations of the process. Movement makes life.

I met a woman who does nothing but dream. She responds to all of the ambiguities of her personal history by dreaming back into them and watching them take on new shapes before moving forward again, into the future. She looks into the future, builds her life and love and identity around a future plan.

A dream. It moves inside of her like a child.

It moves her right out of the present. She lives in her dreams, never allowing the reality of the present to situate her in its quicksand. She thinks it has kept her alive, and has only just now realized: maybe the product was indeed more important than the process after all. And there was this word that she kept saying: homeostasis.

I always think of this word--homeostasis--as being in direct opposition to what I envision as midrashic thinking. Homeostasis has to do with balance and stability, with maintaining a constant condition--and this keeps the body alive. Midrash, on the other hand, is never constant, except in its consistent mobility.

And so I cannot help but ask: What happens to the dreamers, with no homeostasis to keep them alive, their hearts pumping?

Myth of Silence

The podcasts for a conference entitled "'The Myth of Silence?': Who Spoke About the Holocaust and When" that was recently held at UCLA can now be found online. Speakers included Alvin Rosenfeld, Hasia Diner, and Alan Rosen among others.

White Noise: The Disaster Un-Mediated

I just finished teaching Don DeLillo's White Noise for a senior seminar called "The American Literary Response to Trauma." This is one of those books that reveals more and more with each new reading. I'm working on the DeLillo chapter of my book manuscript right now, and so I was especially invested in working through some of my ideas in the classroom.

I'm mostly interested in the novel as a non-representational response to the collective tragedy of the Holocaust. The novel's main character, for example, Jack Gladney, is the Chair of Hitler Studies at his university. He is obsessed with Hitler, and even attempts to look and speak like Hitler (even though he, embarrassingly, cannot speak German). And throughout the novel we get all sorts of tidbits of information about Hitler and Nazi Germany. But there is something conspicuously missing from the novel: there is no mention of the Holocaust or anything that even suggests that Hitler was attached to murder or genocide or anything of the sort. No Final Solution, no smoke-filled chimneys, not even any mention of Jews. Jack Gladney has a blindspot. He lacks an awareness of the ethical dimension of his studies. But we bear witness to his blindspots, his inabilities--and we become secondary witnesses to the disaster of the Holocaust, the event that, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, robs us of all authenticity.

It is this omission of the most obvious aspects of the disaster that draw our attention to it in a way that is unmediated, unfiltered by media or artistic impulses (well, for the most part). Jack's experience of the disaster may in fact be mediated by "white noise," but ours is not--or, at least not to the degree Jack's is. In an era that has become somewhat dominated by media representations of the Holocaust and other collective atrocities, White Noise may be one of the more innovative approaches to dealing with the subject matter.

We've seen enough footage from the events of WWII. We've watched enough films and read enough novels that attempt to show how things really were. And it simply hasn't been enough to appease or satisfy our curiosity. But in DeLillo's novel, the ethical category is broached in the sense that we bear witness to the shattering of mediated realities, even when the characters themselves are unable to bear witness (i.e. Jack's inability to address the atrocities perpetrated by Hitler and his regime). Limit experiences such as the Holocaust pose especially pronounced difficulties because their very breadth and intensity compel us to return to them again and again as topics, using whatever artistic or media outlets we can; and yet truly witnessing a traumatic event like this means that our experience of it is colored by gaps and silences and blindspots.

The question is how do we make these darknesses visible?

Forgiveness and the Scent of a Violet

I'm thinking about forgiveness tonight. I wonder what it means and whether it's possible. I've thought about it before, talked about it with my students in the context of collective tragedies. It's an idea that distresses me, one over which I have been known to agonize as I consider, at times, asking someone for forgiveness, and at others being asked for forgiveness.

What if we cannot forget?

Forgiveness--at least, what we understand to be forgiveness--can occur only in the case of two people. One person who is wronged has the option, or the opportunity, to forgive the person who violated the friendship (or acquaintance or relationship) in some way. I cannot, in other words, forgive the woman who spoke unkindly to my sister; only my sister can forgive that woman.

It is in this sense that, in Judaism, the only unforgiveable sin is that of murder. Why? Because the person who has the grievance is no longer here to offer forgiveness. This is, of course, why all of the talk that surfaced in the post-1945 years about Jews needing to "forgive" the Nazis for atrocities they committed during the Holocaust is ridiculous. The witnesses to these atrocities--the drowned, as both Primo Levi and Giorgio Agamben would say--are absent.

I have found that it is so easy to talk about forgiveness in this context--in the great big context that trumps all others. There is a formula: perpetrator + no victim = no forgiveness. It is not so simple when it comes to, well, the simpler things--the daily betrayals that we enact and receive, sometimes without thinking twice.

When I was very young, I remember reading out of some book of sweet little sayings that I had discovered in one of my mother's bookcases. I remember coming across one little saying that seemed to speak to my unsophisticated little self: "Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushes it." I loved that saying for some reason. I took a pair of scissors and, when my mother wasn't looking, snipped that little passage right out of her book, pressing my neat little paper square of wisdom between the pages of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which I was also reading at the time.

I named my favorite doll Violet. The one who has been crushed. One day I looked at Violet, the homemade rag doll, and I took those same scissors and cut off all of her mahogany yarn hair. I cut it down to the scalp. And then I laid down next to her and took a nap, yearning for her sweetness.

As I grew older, I remember time and time again finding that little square of paper in various books. Each time I discovered it, I would move it to a new book, never understanding why I kept it. The last time I disovered it, I was in my senior year of college. Suddenly my eyes took in its silliness, and I felt embarrassed about having loved those words for so many years. I had saved it because of the sweetness I had perceived in it--I could virtually smell that crushed flower's scent in my nostrils.

Did it give me some unconscious license to metaphorically smash others, expecting that they would reward me with sweetness?

But there is no sweetness in betrayal, nor in the forgiveness of betrayal. And yet we are compelled to make everything sweet. We don't want to consider that the heel that crushes the violet will keep walking, smashing everything it comes into contact with, until the sweet scent of forgiveness is no longer discernable.

If this thought becomes debilitating, I revert to thinking about forgiveness in the context of responsibility, something that we see emerge throughout the Talmud. Is it my responsibility to forgive someone who betrays me? And what if I betray someone else--is it their responsibility to forgive me if I am penitent? And if they don't? Must I forgive their incapacities? One wonders how many layers make up the bittersweet bread of forgiveness.

And, of course, one also wonders what happens to love in all of this.

Holiness and the Temporary

The festival of Sukkot (or, the Feast of Tabernacles) begins tonight at sundown. The holiday marks the 40-yr period during which Moses and the Israelites wandered in the desert before entering the Promised Land. For this reason, the idea of temporary dwellings becomes literal, and a family will build a Sukkah in which to reside--or at least eat meals--during the holiday.

The prayer that is said over meals eaten in the Sukkah--Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu leisheiv basukkah--is translated as "Blessed are You, our God, Creator of time and space, who enriches our lives with holiness, commanding us to dwell in the sukkah."

There is holiness in the temporary.

But there is also something magical about the temporary. At least, there was when we were children. How many times have we observed young children building tents in their bedrooms out of blankets and comforters, laughing with delight as they then crawl into their own magical spaces? I remember how my younger brothers used to build "forts" in their bedrooms or outside in the backyard. These spaces were small and temporary, but they were special.

And I also remember how, many years ago, I taught a Sunday school class of 30 6-year-old children, and during the holiday I helped them build a Sukkah in our already crowded classroom. The children, who moments before had been out of control--and who, the week before, had turned their Torah scroll crafts into swords with which they would demolish each other--seemed to somehow sense the special-ness, the holiness, of the temporary space, and immediately became quiet, looks of awe on their little faces. (Then again, I was probably the only Sunday school teacher in the history of that church to sneakily teach the little Christian children to build a Sukkah!)

As adults, we get to a point where we stop creating these magical, temporary kinds of spaces. We search for something more stable, something that will be around forever, that can't easily be knocked down. We forget that there is holiness even in the temporary.

I wonder if this also translates to emotional and relationship spaces, not just physical spaces. Is there something holy about the friendships and relationships we maintain with people for only brief periods of time? Do we destroy their magic by asking more from them than they can give?

Addendum to the original post: More paintings like the one featured above can be seen at the artist's website.

When Vanity Becomes Terror

When you see this image posted at the top of this post, you might imagine that I've lost it, given the fact that I don't usually snap photos of my clothing and use them as fodder for my blog. But here is what happened.

I received this Cynthia Vincent dress in the mail a few days ago. I had ordered it, but had forgotten about it. On the day the package arrived, I recall hearing my doorbell and hiding in my bedroom because I don't like to answer phones or doorbells. I am overly suspicious of anyone at my door. Later, of course, I discovered the package waiting for me, and felt quite silly. Since that day, the dress has been hanging on the outside of my closet for two reasons: first, I am taking time to decide how I feel about it; second, I am too lazy to find space for it in my already overly crowded closet.

And, I must admit, I like the dress. My mood is instantly better when I see it hanging there. It has become a bizarre source of pleasure and distraction.

The problem--and, my problem in general--is that things often change shape in the dark, which is exactly what happened around 4:30 this morning, when I awoke to a night terror of an altogether different sort.

I opened my eyes and saw a man's long pale face, the space between the hanger and the bodice of the dress. I saw his long arms dangling at his side. I saw his long dark coat, tattered and shredded at the bottom--the place where my dress became scrolls of embroidery. And I stared at him while he stared back at me, the hand my imagination had blessed him with slowly stretching toward me. I sat there, immovable, stationary with the knowledge that this was finally it.

And I began to scream. And scream. And scream. This time, the terror was real, I said to myself as I screamed. This time, it is no hallucination. My screams did not cease until I heard a woman's voice, outside of my window, frantically asking me--or whoever she imagined was screaming--if I was okay. I was stunned into silence for a split second. I looked toward the window, and then back toward my closet door, watching as the ghoulish man's image began to dissipate into the form of a silk dress hanging on my closet door.

"Yes," I said, weakly, to whomever had addressed me through my open window. I couldn't help but sob after that. And this morning, my throat still feels the screams.

I love to say--and do quite often--that darkness illuminates more brilliantly than light. Darkness reveals to us the things that we cannot see when our vision is obscured by light. And so I can't help but wonder what, if anything, was revealed to me, as I witnessed my vanity become my terror. Perhpas there is a metaphor somewhere in here--something about how often we create our own terrors. We organize and arrange them, believing we can control them but never realizing that they control us.

I Don't Know

I recently helped a friend put together an online dating profile on Match.com. With the exception of a brief exploration of JDate a number of years ago, I have had very little experience with such things, but I had this feeling that I would be the best one for the job--that I would know exactly how to craft such a profile.

It turns out that knowing, however, is a big problem when it comes to the online dating world. And I'm not talking about knowing what one wants in a mate (or soulmate, as online daters like to say). What I found while scanning hundreds of profiles (both men and women) was that an insane number of people from their late twenties to early forties claim to be agnostic when asked about their religion. Although some would disagree, and argue for a more nuanced understanding of agnosticism, the term essentially means "I don't know." It suggests that the existence of deities is unknown, and that perhaps even ultimate knowledge and realities are unknown--unable to be known.

I found this interesting because I don't really think I've met many people in person who have claimed to be agnostic. Most people I know either believe or they don't. They are either religious or they are not. They believe in God or they don't. In other words, coming from the world of academia, I have plenty of friends who say they are atheists. But because I am close to people in both the Jewish and Christian worlds, I also know many people who say they believe in God. I, myself, believe in God, though I don't always know exactly what that makes me. But rather than look for a term that encapsulates all of the textures of my spiritual impulses, I choose to say rather concretely that I believe in God, perhaps even that I love God. I would never call myself an agnostic.

So what I want to know, is where are all the agnostics hiding? Are they only online? Is it somehow culturally hip to present oneself as the ultimate repository of "I don't know" when creating an online personna? Is it seen as somehow pretentious to presume to know one way or another?

I don't mean to criticize people who call themselves agnostics. I mean, looking back on the twentieth century it's easy to find plenty of historical moments that call into question the existence of God. It's just that I find it curious--the fact that I never meet agnostics in person.

Are we becoming more and more afraid to admit that we know anything (or that we think we know anything)? But I think the more important question is this: At what point is "I don't know" translated as "I don't care"? My sense is that many people who label themselves as agnostic simply don't care to know the answer, and for reasons I can't quite articulate, I find this most troubling.

I suppose I just want to know that someone cares about the answer to such a big question.

I used to know a man who said he hated God. His eyes would tear up as he told me how angry he was at God. For some reason I found this compelling. I loved God, and he hated God, but somehow we were on the same page. I know another man who refuses to use the labels of atheist or agnostic, and when asked what religion he is, suggests that he is nothing in an effort to resist the labels. I can almost understand that impulse as well. It used to bother me that he didn't care enough to ask whether God exists, but now I appreciate the way he has shifted the question to something that has to do with how and why we use the labels we do in order to categorize our spirituality.

Here's what bothers me (I've just figured it out): I wonder if applying the label of "agnostic" to oneself is really just a sneaky way out of being responsible for at least making a shot at figuring it out, for asking the right questions. If certain things are unknowable, then we are off the hook when it comes to trying to figure them out, right? If we will "never know," then we never have to think about it. So there's my conclusion, for now anyway: agnosticism is perhaps the antithesis to responsibility.

Zizek on Israel: A Lesson in Idiotic Pop Psychology

I love when Zizek talks about Kieslowski. However, I'm not so impressed with his new comments about the situation in Israel (okay, I'm repulsed). Shahar Ozeri, over at Perverse Egalitarianism, says of Zizek's newest comment on the situation: "Bluntly, it’s a a pathetic projection and at best idiotic pop psychology." Ozeri is right--unfortunately Zizek has succumbed to the trendy strategy of "Nazifying" Israel. Come on, give us something new, Zizek.

Tarantino's Way vs the Jewish Way

I haven't yet seen Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, so I'm not going to say much about it. But Liel Leibovitz, in a piece in Tablet Magazine, calls the movie (and its maker) a failure. Leibovitz suggests that Tarantino's comment in the production notes--“I like that it’s the power of the cinema that fights the Nazis. But not just as a metaphor, as a literal reality.”--is indicative of this overall failure.

In contrast to Tarantino's failure of both "morality" and "imagination," Leibovitz predictably points to films like Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity, and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. Of these films he writes:

"It’s no coincidence that all three of those filmmakers are Jewish. Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn’t see cinema as a way to look at reality, but—ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek—as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat."

I like the idea that Lanzmann, Ophuls, and Melville's approaches are talmudic, but I'm not convinced that it's Tarantino's tendency to create alternative realities that make his approach anti-thetical to the Jewish or so-called talmudic one. Isn't it possible that the staging of such an over-the-top alternative reality might actually force us to "worry about the complexities of morality"? Again, I haven't seen the film so I won't say much more. I'm just not convinced that there isn't something useful about what Tarantino is doing. And, is there no way, as Leibovitz suggests, to see Tarantino's film as art? I don't know. We'll see.

I'm not going to compare Tarantino to Polish film-maker Krzysztof Kieslowski, but this discussion makes me think of the latter's A Short Film About Killing, which contains the longest murder scene in cinematic history. But Kieslowski is famous for grappling with moral and ethical quandries, and so his inclusion of this scene seems to ask the question: As members of a so-called civilized society, how much can we bear to see, and for how much of our own past and present transgressions can we bear to take responsibility? It will be interesting to see if this kind of thinking makes its way into Inglourious Basterds.

PS I'm so annoyed by Tarantino's insistance on mis-spelling words in his title.

UPDATE: Charlie Bertsch has written an extensive piece on Basterds over at Jewcy--it's worth reading. After seeing the film, I can say that, moral scrutiny aside, it is certainly not a film about the Holocaust, though I'm not sure I really expected it to be. In many ways, it's another film about film, epitomized in the final scene of the movie, where everything is set ablaze in the cinema.

Where My Feet Will Not Walk

I'm back to Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault after a not-so-brief hiatus of reading other things, including Jabes, which I think I will be consistently reading for the rest of my life: Torah and Jabes--I wonder if that's all I need. Perhaps it will have to be enough--along with my solitude, that is. Anyway, Michaels writes:

"A nation is a sense of space you will never walk with your own feet yet know in your legs as belonging to you."

This is not, of course, the way we typically conceive of nations. In this era--and perhaps as far back as we can go--one's nation is precisely the place where he or she walks with his or her own feet. Where we can and cannot tread defines the place we call our nation. Borders and boundaries keep us in and others out.

But here in this passage the nation is something altogether different. It's very nature suggests its resistance to being tread upon. The implication is that once you walk on it, it is no longer yours. The nation is characterized by longing and anticipation rather than firsthand knowledge. We hope for something because it is not yet ours. And yet it is ours because we feel it in our legs, even though our feet cannot find the evidence of its existence. It is another of life's great paradoxes. I want only the paradoxes, if truth be told. I want the burden of responsibility that comes with such paradoxes.

The nation is symbolic and evocative of yearning and aspiration as opposed to the banality of experience that characterizes our life in the space upon which our feet walk. And I can't help but think--there are places my feet do not walk, but which I know in my legs and up through my heart to be mine. And who are you to tell me that I do not belong? I am looking for a good fight.

Here is Jabes, for good measure (from The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion): "For place, all you will have had is the hope of a mild place beyond the sands: a mirage of repose."

Academia and Atheism

My friend Casey forecasts a split in American academia--which boat will you be on?

Questioning a Scream to the Infinite

Rather than wasting precious nocturnal silence by sleeping, I'm reading Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions tonight. The title itself is enough to blog about. Shouldn't there be only books of questions, rather than books of answers? Shouldn't the arrogance and presumptuousness of claiming to know enough answers to build a book out of them be traded for the honesty and insight of one question?

"The light of Israel is a scream to the infinite" (164).

A brief sentence, but it already contains three words to which I always gravitate: Israel, scream, infinite. I could speculate endlessly on the meaning of this sentence, but I suspect that the only thing to remain would be the question(s). Is the scream a silent scream that howls indefinitely? Or is it one primal, gut-wrenching scream that bleeds itself raw?

In a story that follows the above quotation, a character remarks: "Even when she does not scream, I hear her." Another character says: "I do not hear the scream. I am the scream."

And, the infinite. When I think "infinite," I think of infinite responsibility. Is the light of Israel forever connected to the "Here I am" that resounds in the narratives of the Torah? Years ago I took a nineteenth-century American literature class (I know, abrupt segue). I remember the professor always spoke of "the more within the less"--and that's the infinite. What is a scream to the infinite?

It's just one line in the middle of a large book, and yet I keep asking questions.

"How Much of the Earth is Flesh?"

I'm about 50 pages into a new novel, and so far two passages continue to run circles in my mind.

"Simulation is the perfect disguise. The replica, which is meant to commemorate, achieves the opposite effect: it allows the original to be forgotten," writes Anne Michaels, in her new novel The Winter Vault.

This is Michaels' second novel. Her first was Fugitive Pieces, which may be one of the most perfect novels ever written--let alone one of the most insightful novels regarding trauma and the Holocaust. Considering the work I do, Fugitive Pieces was compelling because of the way it brings trauma to the forefront through focusing on absence and the immense roars of silence, as opposed to diving deep into the traumatic event and attempting to depict it as it really was.

And clearly this theme of allowing emptiness to speak is continued in her newest novel, which has nothing to do with the Holocaust. This one is about a couple living on a houseboat on the Nile River, moored below the towering figures of Abu Simbel. The main character, Avery, is one of the engineers charged with the task of dismantling and reconstructing the temple in order to rescue it from the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. Avery loves technology, but he is torn between it and his awareness of the destruction it perpetrates.

Michaels remarks on simulation are interesting because they raise critical questions about originals vs replicas, especially in the context of memorials and commemorations. What, really, do we achieve by constructing a representation of something (an event, an historical period, a feat of nature, etc)? By creating one thing to stand for another, all we really do is distance ourselves from the original that we seek to capture.

But even if Michaels' narrative is concerned with the creations and upheavals of our physical world, she is also deeply aware of the enterprises of the heart--the intimacy and immensity of the way that emotion functions in our world.

And here is the second passage that I cannot yet forget:

"And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch---it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another--but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment."

It seems that even in the enormity of being in love, it is still about what one chooses not to have; it is still about the presence of absence. It makes me think also of Lot's wife, who (according to some of the Midrashim), while fleeing the city of Sodom with her husband, gazed behind her so that she could look back on the two daughters she was leaving behind. And at that moment, she became a monument of her love for them: a pillar of salt.

Multiplicity and the Secret of the Text

I often find treasures in the middle of night, when everything is opened up and illuminated by darkness. Here, silence is not golden, but it is razor sharp.

I'm in Toronto for the North American Levinas Society conference. I have a presentation tomorrow on Levinas's essay "Reality and its Shadows," in which he questions the nature of art and criticism. I'm going to use this essay to offer a reading of Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, which is so perfect that my heart hurts every time I read it.

Of course it's 2am and I have not finished my presentation, so I'm working--alone, where it's silent and I can see the darkness outside.

Accidentally, a few minutes ago I started re-reading Levinas's essay "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition." I read the following:

"...the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniquness of each act of listening carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation in precisely the inflection lent by each person's ear, is necessary for the truth of the Whole. The fact that God's living word can be heard in a variety of ways does not only mean that the Revelation adopts the measure of the people listening to it; rather, that measure becomes, itself, the measure of the Revelation. The multiplicity of people, each one of them indispensable, is necessary to produce all the dimensions of meaning; the multiplicity of meanings is due to the multiplicity of people."

Even when I am unabashedly appalled by someone else's viewpoint, I must--according to my reading of this passage--listen to his or her contribution in order to discover the "secret of the text." Perhaps one only finds meaning in a room where a number of people are engaging in disagreement.