Time

Years ago I attended a Buddhist retreat, which was meant to be a silent retreat, but because I had volunteered to work in the kitchen, I was not bound to silence, and I exploited my freedom to speak to engage in conversation with one of the teachers. In one of his dharma talks he made the classic Buddhist argument that only the present exists: the past is only an idea, and the future is obviously even more just an idea. The purpose of this conception of time is evident: if the cause of our unhappiness in life is that we cling to ideas, then freeing ourselves of the burden of the past and concern for the future is clearly a way out of our unhappiness. During our conversations, I argued with the teacher, saying that our ability to beat out a regular rhythm is proof that the present is connected with the past and future in our very experience of time.
In the past two weeks or so, I have been working on my sense of time in music. I was shown that my failure to anchor myself in rhythm was my biggest failing as a musician in the big band. I share this weakness with many other members of the band, it turns out, and that's why we don't play tight.
This insight into my weakness came from a rehearsal during which the wind players in the band played without the rhythm section. Our conductor, Eli Benacot, turned on a metronome, which gave an extremely loud beat, but the band kept drifting away from it. He told us that this is what was happening to us when we play with the rhythm section. We generally slow up, and instead of pushing us back up to speed, the rhythm section slows up with us.
Eli explained that the major difference between the kind of music we play - jazz, Latin, and rock - and classical music is what musicians call the groove, the underlying beat that keeps going all the time: swing, funk, samba, bossa, whatever. As if we didn't know that! He told us that he once spent hours and hours playing with a metronome until he had internalized the beat.
During the break I asked Eli how we should practice with the metronome, and he had a very clear method. The main point is being able to shift back and fourth from accenting the first and third beat in 4/4 time (which is the way Western classical music works) to accenting the second and fourth beat, which is the way that jazz and jazz-related music works, something like the difference between "DAdaDAda" (trochees) and "daDAdaDA" (iambs). Eli said that it was something like learning to ride a bicycle (an analogy people use for all kinds of things): suddenly you find that you can do it.
Following Eli's exposition, not only have I been practicing with a metronome, I've also been walking around beating time as I walk (which, by the way, is an excellent form of meditation, because if your mind is entirely on the rhythm, there's no room in it for other thoughts). Yesterday evening, on the way to my pottery class (centering clay is another things people compare to riding a bicycle), I suddenly found that I was able to shift easily between trochees (DAdaDAda) and iambs (daDAdaDA) as I counted off eighth notes while I strode along. So, have I learned to ride the bicycle of rhythm? Only time will tell.
By the way, of course, all this is far from new to me. I've been playing music, including jazz, for quite a few years, so it isn't as if I had to start from nowhere. Eli gave me a way to reconceptualize and improve my sense of musical time, and I hope that it helps me to play better.

A New Way of Writing

Several mornings in the week, I take the dog to a place where I can let him wander about without danger, and I sit down on a rock or a low stone wall and write in a big fat notebook I bought in CVS or Staples on a trip to America. The dog wanders around, comes back to check on me every now and then, and finally loses patience and starts nudging me with his nose: enough writing, take me home.
I have been attending a poetry workshop for the past year or so. I began attending with a lot of misgivings and have become a convert. The teacher, Jennie Feldman, is a fine poet herself and an excellent, low key discussion leader. Gently she guides us in the direction she wants. The group, mainly women (of course), is otherwise quite diverse, in taste, in literary experience, and in goals. Parenthetically, in my musical activities, I am involved almost exclusively with men, but in my ceramics and poetry groups, I'm almost exclusively with women.
But when I write in the notebook in the morning, I don't try to write poems, though sometimes a poem does grow out of what I write. Nevertheless, I do write in separate lines, as if I were writing poetry.
When you write a phrase on one line,
And the next one on the next line,
You can see your sentences take shape,
Because, after all, it's the shape
Of your sentences
(Metaphorcially, of course)
That makes your writing what it is,
And it helps with word choice too,
Because you can see and hear the words better,
When they're sitting in broken lines.
And it's easier to revise your work.
As for writing in the notebook, my guiding ideas are twofold: first, making a moment in the day to write is a way of taking the thoughts that otherwise flit through my mind and disappear and making them sit still for a moment, so I can examine them; and, second, catching the thoughts on paper ought to give me raw material for more consequential writing later in the day, or later in my life.

Koan

On Saturday night we ran into a friend who posed us this paradox: can God create a knot that He cannot untie?
On Sunday we visited a friend, an excellent painter, in her studio, and she showed us a book of koans that inspired her work.
Then I thought of a paradox of my own.
Buddhism teaches that the self is an illusion, a mental construct. When you reach enlightenment, not a likely occurrence, you'll understand that about your "self."
So, if the self is an illusion, how can art be based on self-expression?
Or perhaps the illusion that we are ourselves is so powerful that it enables the illusion that is art.

A Brief Trip to Turkey - Cognitive Dissonance

Relations between Turkey and Israel have been deteriorating since the ascent of a Muslim political party, and the loss to Israel is immense.

I have been to Turkey five times now: once on a tour arranged by the archaeology department of the Hebrew University, once at the beginning of an overland trip from Istanbul to Tashkent with Dragoman Tours, once on the way from Macedonia to Romania with some friends, once on a weekend deal to the resort of Antalia, and now we met some friends in Istanbul, flew to Izmir, and saw some of the ancient Greek sites of the Aegean coast. Every time I have gone to Turkey, I have liked the country and its people more.

You can't exactly say that the Turks have a benign reputation. The Ottoman Empire was a dangerous rival to the kingdoms of Europe for centuries, halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683. Romantic support for the Greek revolution against Ottoman rule did not exactly make Europeans love the Turks, and the slaughter of the Armenians during World War I is a crime against humanity that the Turks haven't yet wrestled with, as far as I know. "Midnight Express" also made Turkey look very bad. When I was in college, back in the 1960s, almost no one wanted to go there.

On our first visit to Turkey we were dyed in the wool hellenophiles and prepared to dislike the Turks, but we couldn't. They were friendly and helpful, pleasant and hospitable. So much so that I find it absolutely impossible to fit what I know about Turkey - brutal suppression of the Kurds, illegal invasion and occupation of Cyprus, repression of civil rights and dissent - with my uniformly pleasant experiences there.

I am aware that, aside from reading a couple of books by Pamuk and seeing a few good Turkish films, I see Turkey very much from the outside, and I understand little of what I see. Use of the Roman alphabet makes the signs legible for us but unintelligible.

That was one of Ataturk's major reforms. He sought to make Turkey into a modern, secular state and only succeeded partially. We were there on October 29, Turkish Independence Day. The streets were full of flags and huge pictures of Ataturk. But the present government does not, I gather, wish to follow through with the program he mapped out.

Being in Turkey gave me a useful perspective and insight into the big picture of recent world history. During the twentieth century many nations achieved independence and were forced to invent or reinvent themselves, and many of these new self-definitions have proven to be false or inappropriate, ignoring too much of the historical heritage, denying the presence of minorities, and adopting institutions that did not grow up from within their culture but were imitations of those of the West. The results were catastrophic.

Indeed, the rise of fascism in much of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century shows that Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal (to name just a few) had as much trouble defining themselves for the twentieth century as Egypt, Turkey, India, and China are having in their effort to redefine and redesign themselves today.

In Turkey I am more or less impartial, not an Armenian or a Greek with a historical grudge, not a Kurd who wants independence, but an observer coming from a country with its own deep problems of conflict and self-definition. The outside observer sees problems with clarity that derives from ignorance of the details and complexities. Can one bring that perspective back home and apply it to the issues one faces there?

Identity Stuff

When I was young I went to synagogue to reinforce my Jewish identity, never because God meant anything to me. Then, when I first came to Israel, still rather young, I thought: Here you don’t need a synagogue to be a Jew. But later on, still a total unbeliever, I wanted to be Jewish actively, not just by default, so I became an unbelieving orthodox Jew. But after many years of that, I realized that wasn’t who I am either. So now I’m a floating Jew, not quite by default, certainly not orthodox, no believer in God, not capable even of imagining belief in God (which is all it ever is anyway). But those ceremonies mean something to me. Maybe defining that “something” would explain who I am as Jewish person.

Everybody has to be something. But we are wrong if we think of “something” as one thing that can summarize and encompass a whole. For everyone is necessarily many things. Some of what we are is virtually inescapable. Some of what we are is accepted without question. Some of what we are is intentionally chosen. Sometimes we intentionally choose what society wants to impose on us in any event - “society” taken in the broadest possible sense – and some of us intentionally reject what society tries to impose on us. Our lives are spun out between objective and subjective constrains. Are we free? Did we choose to become what we have become?

I wanted at one time for the word “Jew” to define me most completely. But that didn’t work out. So I tried the adjective “Jewish” and called myself a “Jewish man.” But I wasn’t so much deciding who I am as putting myself into categories. “Jewish” cuts me off from almost everyone else in the world, those who are not Jewish, and it places me in a category that appears to be much clearer than it is, because the boundary between people who are Jewish and those who are not is a fuzzier boundary than many people on either side of it would care to admit.

“Man” is a huge category, distinguishing me from sentient beings who are not human and from human beings who are not mature males of the species. Though, on closer scrutiny, we see that the boundaries between men and boys and that between men and transgender people are fuzzy in their own way.

I am this, and I am that. I am sometimes this and sometimes that. I was once that, and now I am this. In the future I might be neither this nor that – and I certainly will be nothing at all some day.

Sometimes, like right now, I think about issues. Does that make me a thinker? Sometimes I write poems. Does that make me a poet? I do many different things: I play saxophone, I translate from Hebrew to English, I walk my dog, I make ceramics, I go to the movies, read books, listen to music, attend religious services, have intercourse with my wife, have sexual fantasies about other women, sign petitions, go to an occasional protest demonstration, eat, drink, piss, shit, fart, sleep, dream... The list is not endless, because my life is not endless (or beginningless), but it is very long and varied. Just now, as I looked at what I wrote, I thought of many activities I’d left out. But my point was to be illustrative, not exhaustive.

No matter how long the list might be, one knows that some of the items on it are expressive of who feels that one is, while others are not. Not everyone who plays an instrument is a musician. Perhaps the test is negative: if you stopped playing your instrument, would you lose so much of what you feel yourself to be that you would no longer be yourself?

Surprising Myself Pleasantly for a Change

When I began throwing pots on the wheel, it sometimes took me forever to center the clay, and I often lost patience and went ahead and tried to make a pot, even though it wasn't centered. The results were sometimes interesting, but I didn't have much control over them. Recently I've improved, so that I can almost always center a smallish hunk of clay quite quickly. In fact, I'm often surprised to find that I've succeeded and can hardly believe that I've done it. The next steps are to learn to center larger hunks of clay, and, of course, to keep the pot centered all the way through the making of it.

Similarly, when I began trying to improvise, it was very hard for me to stay together with the rhythm section and reach the end of the piece the same time they did. I used to get lost all the time. Now I pretty much know where I am. I hear the accompaniment better, I keep the song in my inner ear more consistently, and I can plan my improvisation better (like increasing the number of moves you can plan in a chess game). But I'm still surprised to discover I haven't gotten lost.

I've got a long way to go both in pottery and in music, but it's nice to see that there's been some progress: I've achieved more control over the process.

However, there's a danger in that, too, because too much control stifles creativity. It all depends on where you apply the control. You want to master a craft, so that the material does what you want it to do, but you also wanted to liberate your imagination, so that you can want to do interesting things. Sometimes less skillful artists manage to be more creative than the masters, to compensate for their shortage of skill.

Suspicion of Language

Words make misunderstanding possible.
Maybe they make understanding impossible.
You can never get to the bottom of an utterance.

"The American" starring George Clooney

I'll start by admitting that I enjoyed it.

Clooney is a fine actor, the scenery was beautiful, and so were the two main actresses. However, the plots of some movies, if you poke at them, fall apart completely, and "The American" is that kind of film.

Just one example: about halfway through the film someone (a Swede) arrives in the photogenic Italian mountain village where Jack, the Clooney character, is laying low. There is a gun fight, an innocent bystander is killed, and Clooney eventually shoots the Swede. Now, if such a thing happened in "real life" in a tranquil Italian village, the police would undoubtedly swarm all over it the following day, and they would obviously question the mysterious and reticent American "photographer" who had taken up residence there. But two people are killed in the village, a local citizen and a Swedish assassin, and the police take no apparent notice.

However, I'm more interested in the metaplot, as it were.

In the first 5 minutes of the movie, gunmen first as Jack, but he kills both of them, as well as a Swedish woman he had been sleeping with in an isolated cabin in the snowy woods. The audience, naturally sympathetic to the character played by the star, assumes that she had betrayed Jack to the killers, but later on he admits that she was "a friend," not implicated in betrayal, and we have to figure out by ourselves why he killed her.

Throughout the movie Jack is apparently tormented by this crime, though he never comes out and says so. That, of course, is the film's saving grace: Clooney manages to convey the turmoil of Jack's conscience in silent tension and reticent conversations with a kindly priest.

I immediately realized that Jack had to die at the end of the film. That's an iron-clad rule of films of this genre. A problematic hero, who murders someone at the beginning of a movie, has to be killed at the end. A happy ever after would violate the conventions of this kind of thriller.

However, think of how interesting the movie would have been if Jack had not been fatally wounded in the final gun fight, if he had managed to run away with Clara, the redeemed prostitute (another unbearable cliche), and they had found some safe haven, married, and started a family. Each would have borne a terrible secret into his or her new life: Jack's violent past as a hired killer and his guilt as a murderer, and Clara's past as a prostitute! Suppose the movie were narrated from the point of view of a child of theirs, a young adult, who suddenly figures out that her parents' life story just doesn't fit together and tries to find out the truth.

That would be a movie worth seeing.

Bible Hill: Digging into the Past

This is a picture of the remains of a search for remains: a square left by archaeologists, which, over the years, has become a kind of archaeological remnant of its own.
I don't know why there haven't been extensive excavations on Bible Hill. Perhaps the test squares failed to indicate the presence of important remains, or perhaps the Department of Antiquities lacked the resources to do a full excavation.
It's hard to imagine that a hill in such a prominent location remained undeveloped over the thousands of years of human settlement in Jerusalem. On the other hand, it's also hard to understand why it remained undeveloped in the 60 odd years of the existence of the State of Israel. Maybe there's a problem of ownership.
Property rights in Jerusalem are often difficult to sort out (I say this in the light of a very recent Supreme Court decision denying the rights of Palestinians to the houses in East Jerusalem where they have been living for decades, because the land was owned by Jews before 1948 - a clear instance of a huge disparity between law and justice).
Archaeology also raises the question of how much the past should own the present. Does the presence of something ancient necessarily trump the claims of living people? If the point of archaeology is gathering evidence about the past, once the evidence has been gathered, why not clear away the ancient debris, especially if it's not something particularly beautiful or impressive?
Archaeology can be a metaphor for our attitudes toward our personal past. Some people turn incidents in their past into monuments, and others sweep their past away and move on. I don't think this is the result of voluntary decisions. Some of us can't stop worshiping our past. We can't clear our ancestors' bones out of our living room altars, while others can't relate to those dusty urns at all. There is danger in remembering too much and in forgetting too much.

On Improvisation, Another Interest

Years ago, when I first began attending the workshops given by the late Arnie Lawrence, I told him that my goal was to learn to improvise. At the time, I thought it was a kind of technique that you could learn, and, in a sense, it is, but not in the way I thought it was.
On the one hand, improvisation isn't all that mysterious or difficult. Every time you open your mouth and utter a sentence, you're essentially improvising. When you're learning to speak a foreign language, it often takes a long time before you can produce new grammatical sentences in that language -- improvise in it -- and improvisation in music is very similar in that respect. You have to learn the musical language that you're improvising in before you can do it.
My goal was to improvise in the language of jazz, and it has taken me ten years or more of steady work to reach the point where I am beginning to feel confident in my ability to do it.
Earlier in the process, when it came my turn to improvise, I often felt like someone who has dived into murky water with his eyes closed, hoping to come up in a certain place, but never sure whether he'd reached it or not until after his head broke the surface and he could look around again.
Or else I felt as if the music were zooming past me at such a pace that I could never catch it.
The next step was playing relatively mechanically, repeating similar patterns over and over again, because it was hard enough to say to myself, "This is an A Major Seventh chord, and I can play certain notes over it," so I couldn't be in much control over which notes I played or how I played them, as long as they weren't wildly inappropriate to an A Major Seventh chord (though, in fact, if you play it in the right spirit, you can play any note over any chord).
I'm still more or less at that stage, but I'm getting better at choosing the notes and avoiding repetitive patterns (at least I think I'm improving at that). Improvisation involves a paradoxical combination of control and freedom. The best times in playing a solo are when you suddenly find yourself playing something that surprises even you, when you suddenly think of playing some notes that you've never practiced and never thought of before.
It's very much like what can happen in writing: an unplanned thought occurs to you - and it's the most important thought of all.

Complaints

This is the way the old and disused Jerusalem railway station looks from the western edge of Bible Hill. The neglect of this venerable and beautiful monument is, at least metaphorically, criminal. About half a year ago, somebody set a fire in the upper floor. You can see the stains left by the smoke over the windows. The official response to this arson was to place some police barriers (which soon fell down) and warnings that the building was now "dangerous," meaning that it might fall down onto passers by.
The railroad station is not the only derelict public structure nearby. Obviously real estate developers have their eye on it, but until someone decides what to do and receives permission to do it, the building sits in neglect.
A few years ago somebody commissioned murals on metal panels that were placed over the doors and windows, pictures the evoked the building's past as a center of transportation between Jerusalem and Jaffo during the mandate period. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century by the Ottomans. The railroad connection between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean coast changed the character of the city.
I am upset by the neglect of this lovely building, which has so much potential, and, on a larger scale, I am upset because this kind of thoughtless neglect is typical of life here in Israel. Why isn't anyone taking on the mission of saving the railroad station and turning it into an attractive cultural and commercial center?

Bible Hill - An Explanation

Two or three times a week I take a short walk with Kipper, our dog, to a place that the Jerusalem Municipality has decided to call "Bible Hill." Aside from putting a couple of signs up, informing the public that it is an urban nature preserve, the city has done nothing in particular to change it form the way it has been for as long as I remember: a low hill rising up between the disused railway station to the west and the Mount Zion hotel, to the east. The Scottish Church, which appears in the photograph here, is to the north, and to the south is a recently refurbished stucco building that once housed part of the government printing office.
On the lower east slope the remains of an ancient quarry are visible. Between the church and the recently built Begin Center are ancient burial caves. Some impressive archaeological discoveries have been made there, but for now no one is digging.
I go there with a notebook and try to jot down ideas while Kipper runs around, but he foils me. When I sit down quietly, he comes and sits down restlessly next to me, sticks his nose in the notebook, and demands that I walk around with him. So I decided to bring my camera as well as my notebook.

Sitting on a Half-Demolished Stone Wall

Here I am on a hilltop

In the center of Jerusalem,

Vacant for no discernible reason.

My mongrel is roaming free –

No cars here to kill him,

Plenty of things to sniff at.

Trivial questions distract me.

I don’t even know what kind of building

This wall once belonged to.

What am I trying to capture or figure out?

There might have been a message once, but

I was young, and the young

Don’t know how to listen. They only hear

Words they’ve already said to themselves.

So I probably got the message wrong

Or misremember: Maybe no one told me,

“Life is supposed to be fun.”

Now I think they were saying:

"Life isn’t supposed to be anything

Specific, just what it turns out to be."

Performance is Reality (or vice versa)

Yesterday evening I played jazz with my friend Ra'anan, a pianist, at a restaurant in Jerusalem. I played baritone sax. I like to compare the baritone to a big, friendly dog. It's so big, it doesn't have to be aggressive to make its presence felt. But it's a heavy, clumsy instrument, and playing it standing up takes a lot of strength.
We performed about ten songs, a mix of standards, blues, and Latin. Ra'anan and I have been playing together for years, and we have performed in public a few times, but maybe now we've reached a new stage, when we'll be performing a lot more.
My concentration on the music is considerably more intense when I'm performing in public, even if the audience is mainly people who aren't really listening very carefully. I am inside the music in a way I can never be when I'm just listening to music. If I were a better listener, I would also be a better player.
Bringing your art, whatever it is, outside, putting it in front of other people, gives it a quality it can never have when it's only private. In theory or aspiration, I always try to play so that every note I play counts and matters (or, for that matter, so that every word I write matters). But of course that's something I can rarely achieve. When I play for other people, my intention is more powerful. At the end of the evening, I am both exhausted and exhilarated.

Our Wonderful Rabbis

In a recent sermon, the "spiritual leader" of the Sefardi Torah Guardians, a large and powerful factor in Israeli politics, called upon God to kill the Palestinians in general and Abu Mazen in particular. Another rabbi has written a book that explains when, according to Jewish law, it is permissible to kill non-Jews.
While it is certainly troubling that among Israel's rabbis there are thinkers who rival the mullahs of Iran in their benighted extremism, it is almost more troubling to see the solidarity of much of the orthodox religious establishment in support of these disgusting figures.

If Clothes Make the Man, I'm in Trouble

When my elder daughter got married thirteen years ago, I bought a light brown, three piece suit in honor of the wedding - and I wore it. The wedding was in August, but it was outdoors, and the suit wasn't too heavy.
Since then I don't think I've worn the suit twice. The men in Israel who regularly wear suits are the ultra-orthodox, and the rest of us mainly dress casually. A shirt with buttons is pretty formal by Israeli standards.
When my younger daughter decided to get married, I planned to wear the same suit. I checked, and sure enough, I could still get into it. It needed pressing, but it still looked fine. So on my list of things to do before the wedding was to purchase a new dress shirt that would go well with the suit. I ended up buying one for 219 shekels, which is about $57, and I NEVER have paid that much for a shirt before. My idea of an expensive shirt is one that costs about half that amount. (You can guess where I buy my clothes!) But I figured that for my daughter's wedding, I could splurge for once in my life. Anyway, we were spending so much money, that $57 for a shirt was negligible.
In the end, I didn't wear the suit, but I did wear the shirt. Israel was plagued with an extreme heatwave this month, and if I'd worn a three piece wool suit, I would have been carried away from the wedding on a stretcher with an infusion sticking in my arm.
This morning I ironed the shirt, trying to persuade myself that the quality of the cloth and the tailoring justified its high price, which led me to think about why I hate to pay a lot of money for clothes. Is it just because I'm cheap? I don't think so. I'm not cheap about everything.
As for ironing my own shirts, I don't mind it. Every few weeks I have an ironing marathon and take care of a pile of my shirts, and while I'm doing it, my mind wanders all over the place - some pleasant thoughts and some less pleasant.
Among the unpleasant thoughts arose the memory of a British acquaintance of ours named Robert, a large, rich, extravagantly homosexual writer of sorts, who committed suicide by jumping out of his window a few years ago. Robert discovered a Christian Arab chef named Bassam who needed extra money and was willing to clean houses, and he recommended him to us. Bassam worked in our house a couple of times. He was a diligent, polite man, clearly much too intelligent and refined to be cleaning houses, and after a week or two he stopped doing it.
Robert, in recommending Bassam, also praised his skill in ironing shirts, and he immediately realized that he'd said the wrong thing to me. Just as I don't wear expensive clothes, I would never pay someone to come to my house and iron my shirts. But Robert was a wealthy man. I don't imagine that he had a single shirt that cost less than $57. But his life wasn't worth anything to him.

I Wonder About Poetry

In the past six months or so, I have been participating in a poetry workshop led by Jennie Feldman, a British poet who lives in Israel. She is a fine teacher, creating a supportive atmosphere in the group, heightening out appreciation of our own poems and those she brings in by recognized poets (she calls them published poems).
It's been valuable for me. Because of the group, I have written a bunch of poems, and because of the critiques and responses both to my poems and to the others, I've become a better reader of poetry.
However, in fact, I am not a reader of poetry. Occasionally I'll buy a book of poems, occasionally I'll skim through it and read something. But I would say that poetry accounts for maybe 2% of my total reading.
So why should I write the kind of thing that I'm not interested in reading?
One reason I don't read much poetry is that so much of what pretends to be poetry is simply dreadful. You have to wade through a long, long low tide before you get to the deep water. To illustrate:
Recently I was asked to be a judge in a poetry contest. There have been about forty entries so far, of which thirty could be dismissed immediately as (a) not poetry, (b) not written in literate English, and (c) not on the topic of the contest. I had a similar experience as the editor of a volume of a literary journal.
On the other hand, I do read the poems that appear in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, to which we subscribe. But some of them don't speak to me at all. I can see in some objective way that they are well wrought poems, but they aren't about things that interest me. I'm particularly suspicious of nature poems. I have picked a lot of figs this month, and I thought that someone else might write a poem about that. But harnessing nature to your poetry is cheating, in a way. It's like sprinting on one of those conveyor belts they have in airports.

The Only Soprano Sax in Town

When we went to Cyprus a couple of months ago, I brought along the new soprano sax that I bought, a very inexpensive (and consequently not terribly good) instrument, which has the advantage of being light, small, and, if it's damaged or lost, not a big risk.
I don't like to go without playing at least every other day, if not more often. I've invested a lot of effort in getting as good as I am, and I'm struggling to maintain my level as well as improve. But it's not only the compulsive side of me: I enjoy making music. When I travel, I usually don't bring printed music with me, so I play what I remember by ear, I play various exercises, and I improvise. This time I brought my portable computer with me, and I have some pdf files of Realbooks on it, so when I couldn't remember a song, I could look it up.
We were staying in a pension in a tiny village in the Trodos Mountains, and when I played, the sound carried all over. Usually I don't like to impose my practising on everyone else in the vicinity, but people kept telling me that it sounded nice, so I was undeterred.
So there I am, in the bedroom, in between phrases.
Sometimes I think there's an inverse relation between the amount of equipment a person owns and the level of his or her skill. The worse you are as a photographer, the more cameras, lenses, and accessories you acquire. The worse you are as a musician, the more instruments you own.
Of course, like a lot of clever statements, that one isn't true.
Some excellent photographers own dozens of cameras, piles of lenses, and so on, and some excellent reed players might own every kind of woodwinde imaginable. There are different kinds of artists: the ones who keep working in one medium, in one way, forever, finding creativity in depth and concentration, and the ones who take up one medium after another. It's a question of personality, of course, and also one of searching. Sonny Rollins, for example, found the tenor saxophone, and that was enough for everything he wanted to express. But a player like Yusef Lateef used the oboe and other instruments, always looking for the instrument that would play the music he wanted to play.
Anyway, in the end, it's not the instrument, but the music!

Progress (in Pottery)

I made the hand-washing cup on the right about a year ago, and I brought home the one on the left just yesterday.
The older one has a kind of childish charm to it, but it's heavy, the handles are clumsy, and the drawing on it is crude.
The recent one is a lot bigger and more gracefully shaped. I wasn't able to make large pots at the time that I made the first one. The glaze came out pretty well, the handles are neater, and, while I expect that in a few years, if I keep doing pottery, I'll see it as crude and clumsy, the flaws in it are more apparent to a potter than to an ordinary person.
I imagine I'll reach an age when all my systems will be in decline, but, fortunately, I'm not there yet. I'm still engaged in things that I can get better at.
For now, I'm less concerned with the things that I make in my weekly pottery class than with gaining skill and mastery. I'd like to make large pots, but, though I'm improving, I still can't keep the clay centered well enough to do it consistently. For the sake of discipline, I spent the last five or six sessions making nothing but mugs. Some of them came out decently, but I still am not able to produce a form that I have in mind in advance, and to produce the same form consistently, time after time.
I could rationalize (and I do), saying that it's more creative and spontaneous to work the way I do, but higher creativity comes from mastery of technique, and higher spontaneity comes from the ability to do what you set out to do.
Still (here's the rationalization): I know, from writing and music, as well as from pottery, that the best moments are the ones when you surprise yourself, when you write something you hadn't thought of before, when you play a solo that is better than you thought you could play, and when you see and feel something in the clay that you didn't know was there.
By the way, for anyone who might read this and isn't familiar with Jewish ritual, the hand-washing cups are used before meals, with a blessing for washing hands, before one recites the blessing over bread.

My Schizophenic Friend

I have known the man I'll call Mannie here for about fifteen years, and in the past five or six years, since we have been driving to a weekly activity - about forty-five minutes each way - I've got to know him very well, and, despite his severe mental illness, I can call him a friend.
Mannie is a large, slow-moving, gentle man in his forties. The drugs the psychiatrists have been giving him have made him quite fat - though sometimes he loses weight, because he has hallucinations about his food and can't eat anything.
It took Mannie years to trust me enough to admit that his illness was mental, and by now he often bares his soul to me, and I don't really know what to do with his confidence. I'm not a psychiatrist, and I'm never sure what I should be telling Mannie.
Mannie sometimes complains that he feels as if he's drunk, but without the pleasure of being tipsy. He hears voices that tell him to do all kinds of things: mainly to protect people about whom he's worried. He worries in particular about one close friend, who has stood by him for years. Mannie has often said to me, "I'm very worried about Arnold. I think I should park my car in front of his house all night and make sure nothing bad happens to him." Mannie thinks that the police or some other "bad people" will come at night to murder Arnold, and he can stop them.
He has similar fantasies about hospitals. The other day he told me that he had seen an elderly man dressed in blue and white, and he stopped his car to ask the man if he could help him. The man said he was going to Hadassah Hospital. Mannie offered to give him a ride, but the man said he would take a cab. Mannie decided to drive to the hospital himself, so that he could protect the stranger dressed in blue and white. He apparently spent a few hours wandering around the hospital, protecting the patients.
Just recently he told me that he was sure that some very evil people were doing bad things to him, making him ill, but that God had given him the strength to withstand it.
A few years ago, when the news was coming out about the accusations against Moshe Katsav, Israel's former president, I made the mistake of mentioning the case to Mannie. It was clear to me at the time that, where there's smoke, there's fire. Katsav would not have been indicted for sexual misconduct if there was nothing at all behind the accusations - whether or not he will ultimately be found guilty.
It was an error for me to raise the subject, not because Mannie was an ardent fan of Moshe Katsav's, but because Mannie believes he forced a woman to have sex with him in Eilat, years and years ago. He construes the most innocent remark, such as, "Mannie, did you bring your music stand?" as an accusation: "Mannie, you raped that woman in Eilat."
Mannie is a sweet, kind man, considerate, helpful, and even humorous, when his illness will allow him. His suffering is entirely incomprehensible - to him and to anyone who has never experienced something like it.
Sometimes Mannie calls me for advice, and I try to tell him: "It's only your illness talking." Maybe if he could begin to dismiss the voices that tell him that the people he loves are in danger, he could manage his life better. But from the way he speaks of them, it's clear that those voices have more strength and presence than anything I could tell him. Though he often seems to call me because he wants me to tell him not to go and guard Arnold.
Other times I tell him, "Mannie, it's normal to be worried about people. Everybody's worried about the people they love." Or, "Mannie, it's true, there really are a lot of bad people in the world, but here in Jerusalem we're well protected by the police and the army." He isn't entirely out of touch with what I think of as reality, and I try to appeal to that.
However, Mannie gets messages from the signs of buses and billboards, or from the way people in the street look at him. I sometimes try to say, "Mannie, we all feel that something could be a sign of bad luck or good luck." I also asked him, "Do you ever see signs that are encouraging?" He loves lights, the sight of a town from a distance, and he admitted that sometimes he gets a good feeling from them.
There's not much anybody can do for Mannie, beyond being patient and friendly. He's been in and out of mental hospitals very often, and the doctors haven't been able to find a drug that will control his psychosis. My contacts with him leave me feeling very troubled. I'm relieved that I can leave him behind and go back to my own life. But it's terribly sad to see a big, strong man crippled by the chemistry of his brain.

My Notebook

I don't always remember to keep my notebook with me, and I don't always remember to write things down in it, and I seldom think of paging through it to see what I wrote.

Passover Thoughts - Two Months Late or Ten Months Early

Before our Seder, I went over the story of the Exodus with my grandchildren, and that made me realize that the telling, rather than the Exodus itself, is the main experience. Since all of the Israelites who actually left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea died in the desert, the ones who actually entered the land had only heard about the experience.

You don't have to believe in miracles, in divine intervention in history, or even that the story of the Exodus might be based on some kernel of historical truth to appreciate the power of telling the story. One wonders: why did the ancestors of the Jewish people tell this story about themselves? Why did they want to "remember" that they were once slaves? And why did they locate the story of their redemption in the past?

We (whoever "we" are - everyone who identifies with the story of the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, perhaps) certainly didn't manage to stay redeemed. The Bible says it's our fault: we lapsed into sin and idolatry. A cynic might say: what can you expect? That's human nature. But a religious person can't accept human nature (which may be why I can't honestly call myself a religious person). Religious life is a life of yearning, yearning for the restoration of past perfection, yearning for the realization of future redemption. And also yearning for another kind of human nature.

Ritual is the effort to create a temporary state of redemption in the here and now. Every once in a while that works for me.

If Something Happened, it had to Happen

By definition.
If it didn't have to happen, it wouldn't have happened.
Everything that happened up to this very moment was inevitable.
Otherwise we would have avoided it.
So is free will an illusion?
I think so - but an inevitable one!

Importance

Importance is relative, not absolute.
Something is important to me only because I believe that it is important to me.
Something that is important to someone else may be (and probably is) of no importance at all to me, and vice versa.
Art has the capacity of making something that was important to the artist important to the audience of his or her art.
Most things that we think are (or will be) important to us turn out to be quite unimportant, in retrospect.

Mistakes and Errors

In an op. ed. piece by a cognitive scientist I once was exposed to the distinction between mistakes and errors.
A mistake is when you step on the accelerator rather than the brake.
An error is believing that accelerators are brakes.
Why do people persist in error?
Because they have too much invested in it to let it go.
We unconsciously believe that we will be unhappy if we abandon the error, but we don't realize that the error is the cause of our unhappiness.
We think that if we abandon the error, our lives will be empty, but we don't realize that the error merely masks the emptiness of our lives and prevents us from living meaningfully.

Two Recent Poems

If only! If only!
That impotent chorus!

On a hike I learned
The wisdom of looking back:
Dry boulders, water-worn pebbles.

Hard footing
Sun, sweat, thirst

“Look back,
“It’s a different landscape
“from below.”

Yes, that’s where I made a wrong turn
Didn’t see there were two paths.

Anyway, they all meet at the Dead Sea

*

The Bed I Share

I’ve dreamt a lot in it
Embraced a woman
Whose bed it equally is
But when I lie
Sleepless and dreamless
Long before dawn
And listen to her deep breathing
She is as much a stranger
With her imponderable life
As that young man
Reading a book
At the table over there in the corner

Nothing has to be mine
Just as I needn’t have been at all