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.