End of Kipple #10

May 24, 2011
I have been writing, just not posting because life is hectic. I will post retroactively, obviously, but here's a slight update:
1. Ulpan is ending officially in about two weeks (June 6).
2. The Ulpan final exam is in two days from now (Thursday, May 26).
3. I have found a wonderful apartment in the city of Yafo (Jaffa) and am moving there permanently on June 1, for at least a year.
4. I love my job!
5. Life is great.
6. It's all in the music and the gigs are picking up.
7. The world is apparently simultaneously exploding and imploding around us, but if I didn't watch the news, I wouldn't have the slightest clue, even though I technically live in East Jerusalem.
8. Word has it that the s&*t has hit the fan, isn't just about to, and the world is changing in big, bad ways. We need leaders, rational thinkers, partners for peace, etc. etc. I say: Since when has any era differed when it comes to the mood, trivialities, and obscenities of the human race?

May 20, 2011
I guess we can count 64 ways in retrospect to solve an issue and say what we could've done, what we should've done. One for each year. For the times, they are a'changing. That's what the media says, at least. Life doesn't change much anyway. We keep on going just the way we have been. Illusions are reality if properly sustained.

Praying Mantis by the Jordan River

Can you see me changing? Can you feel it? It's different looking from the inside-out than it was when I was looking in. Things are necessary--states and borders, people divided. This division is comparable to Siamese twins who share a heart. Nearly unsustainable, the heart beats for both and they resent each other--it is a mutual dependence and a knowledge that one must go and the other stay. But they can't imagine a world apart or without the other or without themselves. Who can?

Surgery is always risky. Better to save one, if possible, than to definitely lose both. But saving one is still only a possibility. Both may be lost anyway. The twins are two sides of the same coin, forever joined and forever facing apart.

Israel is one face of a trick coin that will always land on "Heads". We are on the brink of something we've all tentatively imagined but couldn't quite make clear. Hope is frail. Neither side can live without the tension of the other.

I am reminded that we hate the most what we love even more but won't admit to. We know no other life. Violence is the background of society here. Perhaps it is the foundation. The threat of no tomorrow, or not today, the reality of precariousness lends itself to life here. We are the fragile prism hanging frozen in time at the pinnacle of the parabolic arch into which we've been thrown. The prism is most beautiful in the moment before it shatters.

House Garden at Kibbutz Ma'agan Micha'el

Israel would love peace but we have no idea what that means. The idea is familiar, a memory itching at the backs of our minds, unrealizable. The army forges brotherhood, turns little boys into men in a split second during an ambush just outside of Sh'chem when one little boy ends and the rest have to carry him home. What would we be without the little boy in the box? I can tell you easily: a completely different country. Our whole lives revolve around knowing that this may be the last time we ---, around knowing that we may never get to do ---, and that someone close to us won't. Period. This is my side of the coin.

Since I face in the opposite direction, I can't speak for Palestine. I can only tell you how it feels to be forged together with a face that looks through eyes I'll never possess. From here, I can't see how Palestine can sustain itself on a basic economic level. I can't see how owning merely one side of the coin will ever constitute enough. I can't see a lessening of pride. I can only feel it. Feelings are whimsical and bar the path of logic. But I know that emotion is what drives us as a race, I know that it's instinct, and not logic. So I continue to trust the feeling of the other side although I am blind to the light.

Miraculously, the heart of the twins still beats. But the twins will both die in the end, for the brink on which we stand is the edge of a forge. The coin will be melted down and remolded. What the mold will create, I can't say. I can't even imagine it.

I can say that I will be a part of it. I can say that without a doubt.

May 2, 2011

Yom HaSho'a Ceremony

It has been a year again and it is Yom HaSho'A, Holocaust Remembrance Day. The melodies are somber and so is the mood. The melodies are traditional and after awhile,  catch myself swaying in the way I used to, when I believed firmly in mimicking the flickering sway of a candle so that my body prayed in rhythm with my soul.

The swaying is comforting even though I don't believe in it anymore. Still, I miss being religious. I miss believing in that way even though
I know that I can never believe again. God is somewhere out there, but not to answer prayers. God is only as much as I make It and as much as you make It. God is our own collective and the unfortunate truth is that we are human and incapable of substantial change as a race, despite our ability to understand what is needed on a theoretical level.

It is nice to see people who can cry. I've trained myself not to because I know if I start, I'll never be able to stop. I let the sorrow pass through me as far as it will go. But it is incapable of passing through completely. It merely collects at the bottom of a well that I have dug deep inside myself. Part of me wishes that one day it will overflow and I'll know how to be human again. Part of me needs to keep it buried. I know I'm human already. There are just so many ways a person can survive this world without breaking down when there are too many faces you used to know who can never be seen again.

Because of those faces, I know that the God I used to believe in isn't there. I know it doesn't care and never did and never will. I know that miracles are not divine, merely lucky coincidence, and I know that hell is here, all around us, created by us and by the simplicity of the universe that merely exists. I know, too, that if there is a heaven, I have seen it.

I am driven to create. I am mad to create. Creation is the only salvation, although we all know that everything comes to an end. Ignore that fact of ending and create anyway. Create until you can't anymore so that the creation lives beyond you.