Jews and Writers: On Impossibility

We often want something. And more often, at least for some of us, we savor the sensation of wanting detached from knowing. In other words--we want something, but we don't know what.

On these occasions there are two writers to whom I turn: Edmond Jabes and Rainer Maria Rilke. Every once in a while it will be something or someone else, but most often it's one of these two. I pull out a book and just open it randomly.

Tonight, Edmond Jabes's The Book of Questions is what I open. I see:

Faced with the impossibility of writing, which paralyzes every writer, and the impossibility of being Jewish, which has for two thousand years racked the people of that name, the writer chooses to write, and the Jew to survive. (223)

In both instances, it is impossibility that is chosen. We select the impossible, the "thou must, which takes no account of the thou can," to use Martin Buber's words. We chafe against what is not yet ours, but in the struggle it becomes, somehow, ours. Yes, it is perhaps discernible only in the struggle.

It's akin to the Maurice Blanchot quotation I opened my rhetoric class with last semester: You can only become a writer, you can never be one; no sooner are you, then you are, no longer, a writer."

It's only about process; abandon notions of product and myths of finality. Just keep moving. It should, in theory, give us great cause for anxiety--what with the assurance that we will never achieve what we set out to. And yet, we are liberated.

Don't be reluctant to struggle, is what it makes me think. And don't be fearful of agonizing over the friction. Fear, instead, the day you arrive or achieve.

Ethics and the Tragic Face of Literature in a Post-9/11 World

Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative. –Don DeLillo, Mao II

In between various other projects--finishing my book manuscript, finishing a Woody Allen article, prepping for my German cinema course, creating my new voice over career (Oh, come on--those of you who know me, know how fond I am of incorporating strange voices into every narrative I tell.)--I've started a new project that I'm really excited about.

It's not a form of procrastination. I had to start it because I was thinking through the possibilities for my presentation at the 2011 North American Levinas Society conference in May, trying to write a proposal. I had just finished reading Don DeLillo's Mao II, and was blown away (I know, I'm a bit late on this one.). And it came to me that everything these days--literature, daily conversations, political rhetoric--is either about destruction and violence or it employs violent rhetoric. I just saw an article online today, for example, about how political rhetoric in particular is charged with violent language (political opponents are "demolished," a bill is "killed," "crash and burn," etc.).

But what I really care about is literature--how it looks and feels, what role it plays in our efforts to come to terms with the world around us.

What, I began to wonder, is the new “face” of literature? In an era dominated by senseless brutalities, collective atrocities, and threats of terrorism, how has the face of literature changed both to reflect and respond to these phenomena?

This isn't so different from my book project, which examines the role of non-representational thinking in the context of responses (literary and film) to the Holocaust. But something in the past decade has changed. In a post-9/11 period, it seems that American novelists have begun to forge a path into new ethical terrain. While it may be that the pervasiveness of discussions of violence and terror since 9/11 have colored all of our discourse--social, political, philosophical, religious, etc.--it also might be that the catastrophes of 9/11 gave novelists a new language—a rhetoric through which to address the question of the ethical in our era.

DeLillo’s Mao II in particular highlights the writer’s own anxieties about the place of the artist/novelist in a world dominated by the spectacles of terrorism. “What terrorists gain, novelists lose,” says one character in Mao II. “The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”

And, later on, “the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art” (157).

Hmph. Art vs Terror? What?

So my question, then, is what role do terror and terrorism play in navigating what we might call the new ethical terrain, particularly as it is mapped out in the space of the literary? How can an understanding of the Levinasian “face” open up the kind of discourse necessary (the “discourse whose first word is obligation”) for an understanding of the ethical in the context of the literary (Totality and Infinity 201)? But more importantly, why is such an understanding important, and how might it spur us on to action?

This is what I'm thinking about. I'm really excited.

Awake Inside the Dark

Awake inside the dark...

This is how the verse begins--the second verse of one of my favorite songs (video below).

Yes, and sometimes I do. Just the other night I awoke in the middle of the dark. Something was pulling me down to the center of something. My head, leaning off one side of the bed, felt a magnet's warmth.

I saw a deep pool of blood, my fingers just barely missing it, but tracing its shape.

I did what one does: I breathed out and it was a scream, echoing against the shaking of my body--I, pinned flat to the bed by someone who understood what I was seeing, not seeing. The kind of scream that says I'm as close to horror as I might get in this world. Because it's first the horror of the unknown, tainted with blood and fear of death and trauma--and then we realize that we have come into contact with remnants of the known.

I get these nighttime bouts frequently.

And so just the other night...I wandered around until the first bit of daylight, so that I would not awake in the dark.

So much of my work--even this blog--is anchored by my reading of Maurice Blanchot, particularly his idea that it is darkness that illuminates more brilliantly than light. And one of my Facebook friends today quoted a phrase from a 1968 sermon given by Dr. King: "Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars."

It's when we think we cannot see that our pupils are dilated. We suspend our disbelief not only when we want to imagine, but also, unwittingly, when we want to see. But what are we to do when the darkness reveals madness and horror? What are we to do when the reality of what we find in the darkness differs drastically from the reality of our daily existence. What I mean is this: I know that there was not, that night when I awoke in the dark, a pool of blood on the floor, but I saw it when I was awake, and this experience is incompatible with the life I live during daylight.

And yet it is no less real. It is likely the real more real than real.

Perhaps these near brushes with death and the horror of infinite absence give us a special kind of sight. Think of Abraham, after the binding of his son Isaac--he called the site of the trauma Moriah, a place of vision or seeing.

But what does it mean to see, even when the object of our sight is illuminated by darkness? I suspect I am not supposed to want to merge my two realities: the one I experience in the dark, and the one I walk around in when it is light. But I can't help but see the interplay between the two, and I suspect that my dark reality cannot but come to bear on its counterpart.

LimmudLA 2011 Conference

It's time to register for the 2011 LimmudLA Conference in February. Love this event. You'll never be the same.

Inscribing the Un-Inscribable

I'm reading Nicole Krauss's 2005 novel The History of Love. So far the novel is comprised primarily of one narrator's obsessive list of ideas and moments from her life--many annotated with detailed descriptions, others left to stand on their own.

Item number six reads: "MY BROTHER BELIEVES IN GOD." The description that follows gives us a brief account of a nine-year-old boy called Bird, after he jumped out of a window, trying to fly. Bird finds, among his father's things, A Book of Jewish Thoughts, and soon starts wearing a black velvet kippah each day. He also begins following the janitor around after Hebrew School.

One day Bird watches as the janitor, Mr. Goldstein, buries a number of old siddurs that were torn. "Can't just throw them away," he says, "not if it has on it God's name. Has to be buried properly" (37).

And what does Bird do next?

He writes the four Hebrew letters of the name no one is allowed to pronounce (YHVH) on his homework. On the label of his underwear. Across his class photograph. Across the front door of the family home. On the bathroom wall. And, finally, etched into the bark, with the blade of a Swiss Army knife, of the trunk of a very high tree outside his home.

He strives for permanence. Thou shalt not fade away.

Bird inscribes the un-inscribable. It is G-d's name we cannot pronounce, His face we cannot see. One marvels at the proximity of the notion of G-d and our understanding of death: both unreachable, unfathomable, except in glimmers of recognition here and there.

For Bird, I suppose they are one and the same. Bird--the little boy who flew out of the window and down to the ground, nearly inscribing death onto his body.

Most of us--all of us--wait for death. And many more of us, similarly, simply wait for G-d. We are not Moses, demanding that G-d show His face to us, only to be given His back as he passes us, as we hide in the cleft of the rock. Most of us don't realize that we're waiting. Waiting. Who, anyway, dares cry, "Show me your face!"?

And then there are those, maybe like Bird, who run full throttle into the unknown, aching to break the repetition of the mundane. Isn't it all about repetition, anyway?

I had this conversation with someone last week--the conversation where one person says, "There's nothing new under the sun, nothing unique. Each time we experience a moment of happiness, one that is predicated on our supposition that we have never felt this way before, we are simply being transported back to the first time we felt that brand of happiness. Something has reminded us of a place where we have been before--perhaps only in infancy. There is recognition. There is memory. There are sparks. Nothing more."

And of course I long to break the repetitive emotional cycle that characterizes my pleasure and my pain. Of course I long to imagine that this, right here, is new. That I have somehow escaped the phenomenon of repetition that must characterize being.

And then there is that part in the conversation where one person says: "Death is the only escape from the cycle of repetition. It's the only thing we don't know, the only thing that is new, untainted by human experience."

Do we merely wait for it? Or do we long for it.

And I think to myself later: Death, yes. And G-d. There is G-d. Perhaps they only show up together, death the faithful and effervescent sidekick of one called G-d.

We go no further.

Bird, the narrator suggests, loses his friends because of this weird behavior--this and the fact that he makes noises that sound like a video game, and picks his nose while shielding his face with the side of his arm. As if he can hide from his own shame.

The narrator regrets having taught Bird to sound out the Hebrew letters when he was only five: "It makes me sad, knowing it can't last."

And who would want it to?

Memory and Residue

I've been ill recently, which means I've had the excuse to lie in my bed and watch films on Netflix. One of the films I watched was Summer Hours with Juliette Binoche. I tend to like films that do a fine job of fleshing out the complexity of family relationships, especially when it's a family of multiple siblings. Rachel Getting Married is another one that does it right. But very few films do it in a way that I find satisfying--of course this is probably because I am the oldest of five siblings, and so I feel that I have a strong sense of family dynamics, and am, consequently, overly critical of cinematic explorations of large families.

But this isn't really what I want to talk about. There was one statement, made by the aging matriarch of a French family, as she sits in a dark and quiet room, that I cannot quite forget. Helene has just hosted all her children and their families, and now as she sits alone and contemplates her mortality, she tells her maid Eloise why she is not making the proper arrangements to deal with her material things--which are great in number and value, including many paintings that Paris's Musee d'Orsay has tried to acquire.

She alludes to the possibility that already her children bear too much responsibility for family memories, and that all of these material things would just make matters worse. The things are merely the residue of memory. She says that she desires to burden her children with neither memories or material objects that are simply the residue of those memories. I think it makes sense. I've heard it said that after a loved one dies (or perhaps simply after a divorce), the subsequent fighting over the material objects is not so much about the things themselves, but about what they represent, about the memories.

We fight over memories. We fight for the possibility of being able to touch something that contains memory within it. I suppose we are afraid--afraid that when our hands cannot close around an object, when our fingers cannot trace its lines, angles, or curves, that we will have lost the ability to remember.

I don't mean to be an apologist for materialism. I hate hearing my parents talk about what will happen to things when they die. I don't want material objects. I want my family. I want my mother's laughter to ring in my ears until the day I die. I want to see my father sitting at the head of the table, watching his five crazy children teasing each other relentlessly, erupting in frivolous fits of laughter as they reminisce.

I don't want the table we sat around.

But I also can't deny that there are objects that I can imagine wanting to hold in my hands if I were to lose my parents. My mother collects depression glass--so thoughtfully and meticulously she has collected countless beautiful pieces over the years. We drink from glasses she has collected as we sit around the table, laughing with and loving each other. I imagine that they must carry the residue of my memories of my mother--especially the ones that would rise to the surface if, God forbid, I were to ever lose her.

And this got me to thinking: to what degree are we responsible for memories? Memories are imposed on us by our predecessors, by those with whom we come into contact, by our family--the consequence of our being born into this world. Memories are transferred and transmitted from one generation to the next. But must memory always be anchored to material objects?

When I spent a summer in Ithaca, NY, for Cornell's School of Criticism and Theory a few years ago, I bought an antique dresser with crystal knobs. It's nearly 300 years old, and I cannot deny that there are times when I stare at it and feel a sense of dread. I think about the memories contained in its drawers, and I wonder to whom they belong, from whom I have stolen them.

But then I think about my family sitting around the table, and I realize that it is not the table I need in order to conjure up that memory. It contains nothing but possibility--the possibility of bringing us together so that, together, we can remember. And yet, I think I will never quite know what to do with the residue, how or whether to scrape it away.

Striving to Regret

This year's Kol Nidre service was especially meaningful for me. There's a difference between attending a service because you know you're expected to be there, and actually going and feeling like you were meant to be there--that you're in the right place. I went by myself to a minyan at Beth Jacob, a modern Orthodox shul here in the Pico-Robertson area of Los Angeles; it was called "I Wish I Got More Out of Services," arranged by Michael Borkow, who articulated one of the most interesting ideas over the course of the evening.

In introducing the Ma'ariv, he suggested that one of the most meaningful lessons we can learn from Yom Kippur--or, rather, that we should take the time to consider during Yom Kippur--is how important it is that we strive to regret. And then he took it one step further, and suggested that we should strive for the sensitivity that would allow us to regret.

On its face, it looks and sounds like crazy talk. All sorts of psychologists and self-help books will tell us that living with regret can be lethal. But the trick is to see regret not as a final product, but as part of the process that allows us to truly atone--a place through which we must pass on our way to a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and to know G-d. Perhaps regret is the process that allows us to become more human. We bask in the raw emotion that we experience when we allow ourselves to feel regret. Regret breeds remorse, and remorse creates a deeper sense of our own infinite responsibility to others.

Regret, Borkow reminded us, cannot be the stopping point. We are not cut out for a life lived under the shadow of one long shriek of regret. I recently had a conversation with someone about this very idea. I told him there are things in my life--decisions, behavior, actions--that I regret. He told me that he had no regrets. And which of us was right? Which the better human?

Regret functioning as an end point for me, as something better left untapped for him. I suppose we had both missed the mark, which rested somewhere in the movement between our two approaches. It's alway about the ellipses, isn't it?

Her Skin is Wired

"I let just a little bit of fall in through my window this morning," she said. On one of the final days of August, the day parted just long enough to give her a glimpse of what lies ahead. She likes it when the air is sharp and swirling: bits of memory in shards, cutting and falling in turns, working their way in again. Her skin is wired. On the other side of the bay window in her coastal California home, she watches as one small renegade leaf pretends it is dying in upstate New York. Detached and yellowing, it twists and contorts as it makes it first and only descent. Who will sweep it away?

Her skin is wired.

One touch and her skin is wired. Her breath is deep but it is not hers. She remembers. But maybe, just maybe, she remembers what has yet to be. This is what happiness looks like: the beauty of the unknown.

(Photo Credit: http://centria.wordpress.com/2009/10/)

Post-Happiness

We define ourselves through the lens of tragedy. We see our faces reflected in the wake of disaster. Destruction tells us that we live, and it tells us how to live. Or how we should have lived. And it feels sickening to me--sickening that everything we do, say, and are must be refracted off of a traumatic moment.

This is what I realized today.

I was sitting in an orientation at a university where I'll be picking up a course this fall, and one particular speaker referred nonchalantly to the fact that we are in a post-Virginia Tech era. I had never heard this term before, but I didn't need it to be explained to me. We are post everything, aren't we? In my own work and discourse I comment on our post-Holocaust moment, the postmodern era, post-9/11 ethics, the post-secular. We engage in a discourse about ourselves that is premised on the phenomenon of looking back.

We are all, it turns out, too much like the biblical Lot's wife. We are all looking back on our burning city, indifferent to the consequences. Indifferent to the possibility that we may become like salt and stone. Immovable.

We are concerned with after, when perhaps, as Rosa suggests in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl, there is only during. We look back and imagine we see the climax of our existence. And it is terrible and destructive. We build our lives around it, making meaning out of the meaningless.

Yes, I know--we can only know what came before. We have no access to what lies ahead. But sometimes I fear that we need trauma--or destruction, tragedy, devastation, loss--to form our identities. We don't define ourselves in relation to the positive or celebratory moments in our collective our individual experiences. We don't, for instance, say that we are in a post-emancipation-from-slavery era. And an individual is much more likely to say that he is a recovering alcoholic or a Holocaust survivor even if he is also a successful businessman and father of five happy children.

Happiness cannot cut us to the core, it turns out. We cannot be post-happiness. And who would we be if we were?

Misreadings

I've been reading Ben Greenman's short story collection What He's Poised to Do. I've been reading it off and on for the past week, which one can do because it's almost like a series of letters or dispatches, most of which have nothing to do with each other since they are narrated by different people in different eras. But they're all connected by a similar emphasis on the text, and the possibility that a particular mode of communication can speak volumes more than the content.

One character writes a letter in which he describes his current practice of reading and re-reading a series of letters that he had exchanged with his lover:

I realized that I have skipped from the moment when we became lovers to the moment when we stopped sleeping together. Between that is a gap. I will protect this period, not from shame, not from fear, but from love and from a fierce sense of obligation (48).

What he wishes to articulate, of course, is how much there is to be said about the absence of text during a certain period of the relationship--the period when they were neither up nor down. I love that he is protective of the gap, of the absence. But I can't quite determine why he feels a sense of obligation in this regard.

In an earlier letter the same character tells his lover about his mode of communication with his wife:

"Our conversations then were and invidious reminder of how poorly we were addressing our own needs," my wife once said. She leaves me notes in the morning when she leaves, and I put notes on top of her notes when I go to sleep (45).

In this case, the absence of the absence of text signifies the collapse of their communication. There is no gap, textually speaking, and yet emotionally it is all gap.

And in the very first letter of the exchange, dated 1988 from Chicago, the same character says in the first line: I am not writing to you. I am writing to your letter (41).

How much easier it is to respond to a text, a letter, a collection of words penned. How simple and safe to retreat into one's preciseness of language and its faulty rhythms. Once or twice a year I look at what I've written in my journal over the past so many months, and find that it is littered with gaps here and there--sometimes a couple of months at a time--where I did not write anything. The emotional chaos and neurosis gets documented, while the moments--sometimes long stretches--of simply being and being happy go unreported.

And sometimes when I see that I've neglected to document my own narrative for such a span of time, I feel sick to my stomach, as if I've lost a part of my life that I will never get back. I always fight off an urge to go back into my journal and create entries for dates that somehow fell into the gap. And then the greater horror is the realization that I mean to trick myself into forgetting the absence of text and the meaning of the gap.

There are those of us who can mislead even ourselves, with our careful reliance upon the preciseness of language to articulate our experiences. We forget the ellipses, and we forget ourselves.

Missing Identity: The Unidentified Bonnaroo Couple

Anyone know this couple? The photograph was taken by Jay Karas at the Bonnaroo music festival, and it's such a great photo that he wants to find this couple and give it to them. He's even started a Facebook Group that already has nearly 2,000 members, and now the page has become a bit of a social networking experiment. I've been betting that Monday night (tonight!) would be the night that the couple contacts Jay, and although there are only three hours left (PST), I'm still holding out hope. If you know this fabulous couple, have them send an email to bonnaroocouple@jaykaras.com.

Spread the word!

Interruptions

I'm sitting at a desk in my hotel room in Toulouse, France, putting the final touches on my presentation for tomorrow: "Interrupting Violence: The Photography of Adi Nes and Zion Ozeri." It always happens, without fail, that I work and write so much better when I leave my own space and sit in a room with only the barest of necessities. With everything removed, I always feel again the joy of writing. And knowing that it is not my world, out the window and over my left shoulder, becomes the perfect interruption to the violence of my mundane life.

Fracture for Fracture

I've been working on my presentation for the North American Levinas Society conference, which will be held in Toulouse, France, July 3-9. The conference centers thematically on Levinas's Difficult Freedom--a collection of his essays on Judaism, and a book that gets a reading from me simply because of its magnificent title. It's easier, and cleaner, to long for freedom, rather than experience it. When we have it, we rail against it, knocking our heads against the responsibility that always accompanies it.

My presentation is basically a reading of the photography of both Zion Ozeri--whose work I've been a fan of for many years--and Adi Nes, whose work is interesting but problematic for me. Levinas says that "The face speaks," and when I first encountered the faces in Ozeri's work, I knew that I would one day do a Levinasian reading of his work, which I found so completely and utterly compelling.

But I've been re-reading bits and pieces of Difficult Freedom as I think through this new project. And tonight, as I absentmindedly flipped through the book, I began to read "An Eye for an Eye." Leviticus 24:17 reads:

"He who kills a man shall be put to death. He who kills a beast shall make it good, life for a life. When a man causes a disfigurement in his neighbour, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; as he has disfigured a man, he shall be disfigured..."

This "eye for an eye" phrase might very well be the most destructive phrase ever, given the way it has enabled and justified vengeance and malice throughout the centuries. We imagine that there's something good about this perverse understanding of balance--that wrongs are somehow righted or obliterated if they are carried out on a parallel plane of some sort. Let's say a man kills my child, and is given a death sentence as a consequence. It still isn't balanced, not with regard to me anyway. He took my child. Who will take his?

What we think is a morality lesson about justice and balance is really a complex moment in Torah that begs another re-reading. Rather than show us how to balance the scale of transgressions, the phrase "an eye for an eye" actually shows us that balance is impossible to obtain.

You blind me, and in turn you are, at my insistence, blinded. Are we equal? Perhaps. But I have now taken something from your lover. I have stolen from her those rare moments when you would gaze on her face--the only moments in which she understood the depth of your love for her. Who will avenge her? Who will give her an eye?

A fracture for a fracture: it ruptures us all to the very core, splitting us wide open.

In a move, near the end of the essay, that sounds dangerously close to the words of the New Testament's Paul, Levinas writes:

We must save the spirit of our codes by modifying their letter. The Bible reminds us of the spirit of kindness. The Bible speeds up the movement that brings us a world without violence, but if money or excuses could repair everything and leave us with a free conscience, the movement would be given a misinterpretation. Yes, eye for eye. Neither all eternity, nor all the money in the world, can heal the outrage done to man. It is a disfigurement or would that bleeds for all time, as though it required a parallel suffering to staunch this eternal haemorrhage ( 148).

There is no balance, no justice, no reparation--not really, anyway. Nothing "can heal the outrage done to man." Perhaps we might look for something other than healing or balance or justice.

We Are But Replicas

I'm reading Alex Epstein's Blue Has No South:

He never told her that once, he woke up above the ocean without a shred of a memory of who he was. When he landed, he adjusted to local time the watch that he wore on his right hand...passed the border inspection, and began collecting information about his life: his name on a passport under an outdated photo, his unshaven face reflected in the restroom mirror, his address in a telephone book, the gifts for his children in a suitcase...the cigarette he hadn't managed to finish on the sidewalk outside the terminal...His voice was strange to him, but he tried his best to keep it from breaking when he opened the apartment door with the key he said in his coat pocket and said: "I'm here--at that moment he hoped in vain that nobody would be there, and he would have more time to get to know them better--"it's me" ("More on the Return of Odysseus" 17).

Epstein is one of the more interesting young Jewish writers who has recently made his debut in the literary world. He's one of a growing number of immigrants from Russia (to either the US or Israel; Lara Vapnyar, Sana Krasikov, Gary Shteyngart, etc.) who, writing from a post-Soviet perspective, are creating fiction that is vastly different from their contemporary Jewish literary counterparts, and more reminiscent of the likes of Kafka or Babel.

But I also happen to have recently read Etgar Keret's The Girl on the Fridge, which also uses the "flash fiction" format. In other words, both Keret's and Epstein's books are full of 1-2 page stories--entire stories told in just a few sentences. It seems perfect for a generation of people who live for soundbites and brief Internet blurbs.

But that isn't what I really want to talk about.

I happened to read the above passage from Epstein's book just a few days after I had attended a panel on prayer at a local Orthodox shul. During the discussion, one of the rabbis remarked upon the possibility that when we pray, we are merely imitating ourselves. And, of course, in the passage above, we see a man going through the motions of his life, learning to imitate himself, hoping that one day the mimicry becomes the reality.

But what I fear, of course, is that we are always our shadow at best, that reality is but its shadow. We are replicas of something more real than real.

Today, a friend said that he wondered how it would change the behavior of people in a shul, if instead of being made out of concrete or something ornate, a shul was constructed so that it appeared as if we were praying before the Kotel. And then he stopped himself short, taking my thought off of my tongue, and said, "But I know. You don't like replicas."

He's right, of course: I don't like replicas. I find them theoretically and ethically distasteful; they claim to bring us close to something, but really they just drive a wedge in between us and the original. I smiled the kind of smile that only materializes when I feel the intimacy of someone having just read my mind, and I said, "No, I don't."

But I was reminded of Epstein's passage, and of the rabbi's image of men and women davening, struggling to imitate themselves as they pray. And I wondered if I shouldn't learn to love replicas after all.

Learning in Reverse

Just a few days ago was the end of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which marks the giving of Torah, or commandment, to the people. Shavuot has been--at least for the past 3 or 4 years--my favorite Jewish holiday because it is all about two things: staying up all night (literally) and learning Torah and eating cheesecake. That's pretty much it for me in this life.

But...this notion of Commandment being given to us. These days I can hardly think about Commandment without thinking of Kieslowski's The Decalogue--a 10-part film series that aired on Polish television in the 1980s. We're given the Torah, and we don't know what to do with it. In each of Kieslowski's films, one of the Ten Commandments is explored, but often it is difficult to tell which it is that the film seeks to depict. "Thou shalt not kill" bleeds into "Honor your father and mother," and so on and so forth. Ambiguity, in this postmodern context, seems to trump Halakhic specificity.

And I'm grateful that this is so. Kieslowski paints the world as it is, while, perhaps, the biblical Decalogue gives us the framework for how the world should be--that is, how simple it should be to decipher between "right" and "wrong." Today I spent some time re-reading Franz Rosenzweig's On Jewish Learning, which I hadn't looked at in years:

A new "learning" is about to be born--rather, it has been born. It is a learning in reverse order. A learning that no longer starts from the Torah and leads into life, but the other way round: from life, from a world that knows nothing of the Law, or pretends to know nothing, back to the Torah. That is the sign of the time...From the periphery back to the center; from the outside, in.

Learning in reverse--that's what we're doing. I suppose the question is whether our actions will take us forward instead of back to where started. But let me spin it again, and say that I'm not quite sure whether it isn't backward that we should be moving. I don't know the beginning from the end, the past from the future: they are all continuous with each other, and with me. Because, you see, if we return to our origins, we return to creation and revelation. But we also return to violence, void, and the chaotic: all the rumblings of birth and change. If I could split myself in two, I would move in both directions until I arrived at the place where my two halves would be conjoined again, this time for good.

In Memoriam

I'm moving this week, to be closer to the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Having spent so many years in different grad schools and programs over the past decade--Loyola Marymount, Purdue, Cornell--I've moved back and forth a lot. Moving my life from one community to another has become routine. But even though the movers will arrive tomorrow morning, I find myself just sitting in my place, looking around at all of my stuff, waiting for it to pack itself.

I think it's the fault of a friend who wrote to me yesterday. He said that, for him, the most difficult part of moving is realizing that, as one packs and sorts the material things, invariably there are memories that one begins to sort and unpack. Memories: their tentacles clinging to all sorts of unlikely objects.

A white embroidered tablecloth stuffed in the back of a cabinet, a small blood stain on the corner: reminds me of a dear friend who was dealing with an addiction. He stayed at my house one night many years ago, his nose bleeding right onto my tablecloth.

A framed poster advertising the inaugural North American Levinas Society conference: reminds me of the time and tears our little group put into something that would grow beyond our wildest dreams, taking on a life of its own.

A shrunken silk sweater: reminds me of the girlfriend who shrunk it because she didn't follow the washing instructions; reminds me how angry I was at her for ruining my favorite sweater; reminds me of how much I love and miss her.

But because I've moved so frequently, there aren't many things that remain to cause grief. I discard them with each move.

But, the books. I've been collecting them since before high school, and I would never let one go. I have boxes and boxes of books. I have enough to build a home. And every time I open one as I slip it into a cardboard box, I look for my notes and annotations. And I read the midrash in the margins. "*See Blanchot!" I kept seeing in the margins of one book in particular. It's amazing: I haven't yet found one marginal note that doesn't remind me of exactly who I was and where I was at the time I wrote it.

My entire life is contained in my books. I've written my entire story in the narratives and philosophical musings of others. It's all there, every last second. And only I can read it.

Joy Cometh in the Mourning

Every couple of months I return to this moment. Or perhaps the truth is that I perpetually inhabit this moment. The photograph, I fear--taken in New York City--captures the essence of something very close to who I am. Samuel Beckett certainly got it right when he intimated, in Waiting for Godot, that we are all just waiting for the appearance of our own death. Life is comprised only of holding "the terrible silence at bay."

But what if we are not just waiting? What if we are also mourning, without realizing it?

I was thinking, today, about how much of our mourning is displaced. I spoke to a friend this evening. She had recently ended a 2-year relationship, and she found herself grieving the loss in ways she never would have fathomed. But as she mourned, she began to realize that her sorrow was not connected to the man she had just left. She was mourning the man who came before him--a previous relationship that had ended badly. It was his face that haunted her. It was the memory of how his body felt that caused her to crumble. She realized that it had been nearly three years since she had put spinach in her eggs, the way he had taught her. She was finally mourning him.

But, she said, perhaps I was mourning him all along and I didn't know it. Perhaps the man with whom I spent the last two years of my life was just a symptom of my mourning, its fingers closing around my throat.

Let me go.

Her speculation made me return to my own contemplation of mourning. Mourning: more than one can bear. Il y a, for Levinas--the rumbling that comes before all else, preceding creation and ontology both. A sensation that, painful and raw, makes us whole by splitting us at the root. It is revelation: a shattering that somehow preserves the wholeness, precedes the wholeness, provides the wholeness.

Our society exerts so much energy toward achieving and maintaining something we call happiness. We admire those who appear to be happy all the time. We want shadows. We have lost our ability to mourn, our desire to find joy in the mourning. But I mourn. And I wouldn't trade it for all the world.

Last night I had another night terror. I awoke and I saw a face on my wall, a burning face. There was sadness all over it. I screamed and screamed. I was afraid that the sorrow was being burned away, and that there would be no trace of it in the morning.

Only Loss Is Real

I recently noticed the status of a person on Facebook--not one of my "friends"--that I found troublesome for some reason I couldn't articulate. I've been thinking about it all day, as a matter of fact. The status read: "only love is real." It garnered a bit of attention, all sorts of people clicking the "like" button in response to it, and many posting comments that were really quite silly and not worth dignifying with repetition here.

I said out loud to myself, "Who says things like that? Only love is real?" I found it offensive and childish on so many levels. I mean, what the hell does it mean? That "love" is more real than suffering or sorrow? Or, worse, that it is the only so-called emotion that warrants any serious consideration?

But I was also in the midst of re-visiting Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, which I've written about before. In one scene of the novel, Michaels paints a picture of 1950s Warsaw, when people were desperate with optimism, running around making the most extravagant of claims about all the wonderful things that were going to happen in Warsaw--all the lovers that would find each other, the scientific discoveries that would be made, all the dead that would be raised.

And the narrator responds:

And while people ran about proclaiming such things, I could only think that everything exists because of loss. From the bricks of our buildings, from cement to human cells, everything exists because of chemical transformation, and every chemical transformation is accompanied by loss. And when I look up at the night sky I think: The astronomers have given every star a number.

And then, tearing a piece of paper and crumpling it into a ball:

This is what the world is. A ball where everything is smashed together. I do not know if we belong to the place where we are born, or to the place where we are buried.

And so to the girl who writes, "only love is real," I would say: Look where you are standing. Look at how your feet crush against layer upon layer of loss and memory. Your "love" is nothing without the reality of loss.

I won't tell you that love is not real: one or two rare occasions in my life beg me, perhaps from their graves, to suggest otherwise. But spare me your false consolation, your extravagant claim on love and reality. Show me something more real than what can only be the epidermis of human existence. Show me the real.

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."