Kinds of Art or Craft

I write, I play music, and I make pottery.
A lot of my writing is translation, which is not a creative art, a lot of my music-making is playing the notes that other people have written, which is also, in a way, closer to a craft than to an art, and there's no question that making bowls and cups out of clay is a craft, not an art.
Of course the boundary between art and craft is fuzzy.  Every art has an element of skill, or craft in it, and every craft has an expressive potential.
Writing is abstract.  Sometimes I write with a pen on paper in notebooks, but the writing isn't the words in my handwriting on those specific pieces of paper.  Presumably, some time or other, I might transcribe what I've written by hand, and the writing will be embodied (or disembodied) as electronic code, and then, perhaps, printed on other pieces of paper.
Music making is transitory.  You play something, and it exists for the time that you play it, and in the memory of the people who heard it.
Though of course there is written music, directions to musicians that will enable them to play something, and there is recorded music.  Both of those have something in common with writing, but I still think that the essence of music is unique, live performance.
In contrast to writing (or written or recorded musics), which can be endlessly duplicated and still retain its essence, each piece of pottery is unique, and pottery is solid.  A cup that I made could last for another 6,000 years if it's buried in the right place!
Philosophers of aesthetics strive to figure out what these three forms of expression (along with many others like paintings, photographs, films, plays, or dances) have in common, but their ideas might not matter either to practitioners or to audiences.

The Thin Line between Tragedy and Joy

Our daughter gave birth twelve minutes into last Monday, after a long, exhausting, and traumatic labor, which nearly ended in a caesarian.  In earlier days of medicine, she would almost certainly have died.
We live in a very narrow zone: the thinness of the earth's crust, the thinness of the atmosphere, the small range of temperatures at which the earth can sustain the forms of life we are familiar with, and the short length of our lives.  On a larger scale, let's not forget the short time that the human species has been present on the face of the earth.
Today I got a traffic ticket for not stopping for a pedestrian in a crosswalk.  I was in the right lane of a four-lane road in downtown Jerusalem, and the pedestrian was hidden from view by the car in the left lane.  I didn't dispute with the policeman who gave me the ticket.  I even told him I was glad they were enforcing the crosswalk law.  Compared to the disaster of injuring a pedestrian, the misfortune of getting a traffic ticket is rather minor.
Only a fraction of a second saved the pedestrian from being hit by my car.  Sometimes we are on the wrong side of that fraction of a second, and we are run over, or we run someone over.
We live in the illusion of stability, that what was is what will be, but life is unstable, and we have no idea what will be.

Complexity #3 - L'Histoire du Soldat

For my Bar-Mitzvah, which was in 1957, I asked for a tape recorder, and several of my relatives got together and bought me a four track Revere machine. I used it a lot all during high school, playing duets with myself on the clarinet by laying down two tracks, and that kind of thing.  I also recorded programs from the radio.  The tape recorder came with a set of alligator clips connected to a plug, and to record from the radio all you had to do was attach the clips to the two wires that led to the speaker.
One of the pieces that I recorded was a performance of Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat in English.  I'd never heard the piece or even heard of it before I recorded it, but I immediately fell in love with it, and I played for myself repeatedly.  "Down the hot and dusty road, tramps a soldier with his load."
Last night while I was ironing my summer shirts, in preparation for putting them away for the short winter, I took out the LP that I  bought when I was in college of a performance of L'Histoire du soldat in French, narrated by Jean Cocteau, with the devil played by Peter Ustinov.  It had been years since I'd listened to that music, and I was immediately swept away by its brilliance, energy, and rhythms.  Stravinsky attained richness of timbre by using high and low instruments with nothing in between: clarinet, bassoon, violin and bass, etc. So that a small ensemble could have, at times, almost an orchestral effect.
Could it be that such an innovative piece was composed more than 90 years ago?
And why is this a demonstration of complexity, aside from the complexity of the piece itself?
Because so much time has gone by since I first heard that music, and my experience of life and of music is so much richer now.  On the other hand, I'll never have the sense of enthusiastic surprise that I felt when I was fifteen or so upon the discovery of Stravinsky and his music.
And think of the careers of Stravinsky himself, of Cocteau, of Ustinov, of the musicians who performed, of the conductor, the performance history of the piece, what it meant when first performed in 1918, right after World War I, in the throes of the Russian Revolution, and what it meant in the early 1950s, when the recording I have was made, and what it means today, after so much more music has been made and so much more history has happened.
The music, even while you listen to it, only goes so far in unifying your life.  Your mind wanders, you may imagine the ballet, you may think, if only I played clarinet well enough to perform that piece.  Two people listen to it, together in the same room, and they have entirely different resonances in their hearts.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life #2

This morning, as often happens, I was wide awake at 5:00 am, so I got out of  bed, went up to my workroom, turned on my computer, and got an hour's work done before breakfast time.  Why do I wake up so early in the morning?  What should I do about it?
The reasons why I wake up at that hour, which I started to call "ungodly," but in fact it is very godly, tranquil, calm, good for concentration, are probably a tangle of physiological and psychological factors, and the effort to untangle it all so that I could sleep for another hour or so, seems disproportionate.  Better to accept the situation and make the best of it.
However, there's the complexity again: I am a mystery to myself.  I don't know why I wake up before I want to.
Breakfast time came. I made the coffee, took in the paper, read about as much as I wanted to, but didn't eat or drink anything.  I had to go get a blood test, to see whether the pills that are supposed to be lowering my cholesterol are still working, and to discover whether any other signs of decrepitude and disease are in my blood.  I hate having strangers (or anyone) stick needles into my arm, and I almost put the blood test off, telling myself I was too hungry, but knowing that any day that I decided to have the test done I would be equally hungry, so why be a baby?
The laboratory at the closest clinic to our house, a pleasant twenty minute walk, begins doing tests at 7:30.  I got there at 7:20 or so, took a number, and waited my turn.  By the time my turn came, in about a quarter of an hour, the line was quite long.  I congratulated myself on my foresight.
The two people who were waiting when I got there hadn't bothered to take numbers, which is so stupid I can't believe it.  The old "system" in Israel was that you walked into a crowded waiting room, asked, "who's last?'"  Then you announced that you were now last and waited tensely until your turn came, fiercely protecting your place.  Routinely people would come in and announce that they had been there before and asked someone to save their place, giving you the helpless feeling that your good will was being exploited.
In the past ten or fifteen years, that chaotic situation has been remedied by the simple method of giving everyone a number.  Why you would prefer constant vigilance, announcing to everyone who comes in that they're after you rather than taking a number and waiting until it's called is beyond me - another example of human complexity.  Even on the simplest level, it's hard to figure other people out.
Rather than try to figure them out, I took three numbers, gave the lowest one to the woman with two children who claimed she was first and the next lowest one to the man who had told me he was last, and keeping the highest number for myself. I've decided to be more proactive in my life.  Let's see where that leads.
I'm back now, with a bulky bandage on the inside of my left elbow (I just removed it), having risen at the wrong time, eaten breakfast at the wrong time, and returned to my desk at the wrong time.  Just a little change in your routine, if you have a routine, can make your whole day look different.  Another instance of complexity.  If you jiggle your life in one place, you don't know what will be shaken somewhere else.

The Bewildering Complexity of Life in the World (#1)

Last night we walked down to the Bethlehem Road, not far from our house in Jerusalem, to a street fair organized by the municipality.  A sizable section of the street was closed off, many of the local stores and restaurants were open, two bands set up at intervals along the street, just far enough away from each other that you couldn't hear both at a time, unless you were standing halfway between them.  At stands people sold handicrafts, food, a lot of bread (Bethlehem means, of course, "House of Bread'), and there were some street performances.
Hundreds of people strolled up and down the street, the usual variety: young couples with kids in strollers, teenagers, older couples, and even two Hasidim, a father and son, wearing huge fur straimls and the golden caftans of one of the Jerusalem sects. 
We brought our dog, who didn't enjoy it all that much, but we thought he would be happier with us than left alone in the house.

***

When you think about an event like that -- planning it, the arrangements that had to be made, the security issues, publicizing it, setting it up, budgeting it -- you realize how far from simple it is.  Or if you think about the street fair from the individual point of view of every person who was part of it in any way, the experience they brought to it, their situation in life at that moment, their hopes, fears, loves, hates, you realize that it wasn't a single event at all.  For every person involved, it was a different event.
I was not in a good mood for the first half hour or so, for reasons that I can't entirely explain to myself, and nothing I want to go into here.  Neither of the bands was playing when we first got there, but when we reached the second band, which had set up on the balcony of a building, they started to play.  Judith was looking at the tablecloths on a stand on the east side of the street, and I was waiting for her with the dog on the other side of the street, close to the musicians.
Judith wanted to buy a tablecloth because today we're driving down to the moshav where our son-in-law's grandparents live, and we wanted to bring them a house present.  Everyone who looked at the tablecloths or bought one had a different reason for buying one.  And everyone who ignored the tablecloths completely, or decided not to buy one, had different personal tastes and needs. 
Our need for the tablecloth had to do with our connection with that son-in-law and his family, which is very different from our connection with our other two sons-in-law and their families.

***

The band started to play a Beatles song: Get  Back!  Within half a minute, my mood changed completely.  Everyone within earshot started dancing, some just quietly, for themselves, and others openly.  The musicians were good.  They had a strong rock and roll rhythm and they sang convincingly.  They were pretty young.  Most of them probably were born after the Beatles broke up and stopped performing.  None of them could remember the excitement that people my age felt when that exuberant wave of creativity swept the world of popular music, when it was something new and energizing.

***

People once thought they could figure the world out, that they could find one key idea that would explain everything.  If none of the current ideas was adequate, intense effort would get to the right one.  Christianity was such an idea, a universal religion that explained everything.  But from the very start, Christianity split up into competing sects, each with its own doctrines, each believing that it knew the ultimate secrets.

But even a simple event like the street fair on the Bethlehem Road, an event that lasted only a few hours, demonstrates the impossibility of grasping anything fully.  The broader the context, the harder things are to grasp.  

The Bethlehem Road was more or less a dirt track in a rural area when the British conquered Palestine during WWI.  Under the British mandate, it became an affluent Arab neighborhood.  In the war of 1948, the Arabs were driven out, poor Jews were settled in the neighborhood, two or more families stuffed together in a single apartment, but in the 1970s gradual gentrification took place.  In the past five years or more, the street has become more lively commercially.  

All that history also lay behind the street fair, as well as the contested status of Jerusalem today.  And let's not forget that the fair took place during the intermediate days of the Sukkot festival, something that might have been going on for three thousand years by now.

How can we get our minds around such complexity?

Squeezing Pomegranates and Getting Old

This morning I picked some pomegranates from the two thriving trees that grow in our garden, and I squeezed juice.  This is my agricultural task every fall, and I enjoy it, though it's time consuming.  Every year it's a race with the insects that lay their eggs in the fruit and spread rot, with the birds that come and nibble the fruit that splits open, and with the other things that I have to do. 
We have a huge quantity of fruit to squeeze.  So far this year I've produced about ten liters of juice.  It's a bit sour and very concentrated, so we add a bit of sugar water to it to make it tastier.  We always freeze a good bit of it and use it on special occasions during the year.
I could have gone on picking and squeezing for another hour or more.  I tend to get into things when I do them, but I tore myself away from the task.  Time to get back into the world of words!
The words have to do with acknowledging that, as I approach the age of sixty-seven, I can't think of myself as "middle-aged" anymore.  I have to admit to myself that I'm an old man now, luckily a vigorous and healthy one, still able to climb up on ladders and pick fruit from high branches, still active, but old.
So I've got to squeeze the juice out of my remaining years the way I squeeze the juice out of the pomegranates.  That's the germ of a poem that I might or might not write.

Work Gets in the Way of Things I Want to Do

Years ago, for a college class reunion, I filled in a long and boring questionnaire, and the only question the has stuck in my mind was: What are your retirement plans?
I answered that I didn't intend to retire.
After all, I'm self-employed, I'm pretty much in control of my own time, and until I forget the languages I use, why shouldn't I keep translating?  I like it fairly well, I like being paid for my efforts, and I like knowing that I'm providing a useful service for my clients.
Recently a lot of work has been coming my way, almost more than I can handle, and I'm ambivalent about it.  It's flattering that people want me to work for them, and I've always been the kind of person who does his assignments before doing what he may feel like doing.
Having work that someone else has asked me to do also saves me from the dilemma of deciding what to do with my time.  But I'm a bit haunted by the fear that I'll never get around to doing what I want to do, and that maybe I'll never quite figure out what it is that I want to do.
Anyway, the question of what a person wants is one that can only truly be answered in retrospect.  What you wanted is what you actually did.
So if I'm taking on a lot of obligations - recently a publisher asked me to translate a 500 page book - that must be a sign that I want to do it.  I could have said no.  I could have said I have other plans.  I could have said that I'm retiring as a translator.  But I said, gee, if this important publisher wants me to translate this major book, how can I turn it down?

Working for Old Men

I am working on two translation projects now: another novel by Aharon Appelfeld and a personal essay about religion by Zvi Luz.  Aharon is approaching the age of eighty, and Zvi has passed it.  Both men are enviably clear-minded and active, busy and engaged in life.
I'm half a generation younger than these gentlemen, much closer to old age, if I make it, than to youth.  Working for vigorous older people like Appelfeld and Luz helps reconcile me to the prospect of aging and gives me hope that when I reach their age, I'll still have the energy and commitment to think hard and create.
These authors have been through a lot during their lives, and they have been pondering the serious and deep issues of the human condition for a long time.  Aharon has been an author for fifty years or more, writing about the fate of individuals who are caught, tragically, in vast historical convulsions. 
Zvi was a professor of literature during a long career and has devoted much thought to the connection between traditional Jewish literary sources and modern Hebrew literature.  In the essay I'm working on, he seeks to clarify his ideas and set them in order.
I like working with people who old and more experienced than I am, and I sometimes wonder how much I can learn from a much younger person, which is not to say that I reject the insight and intelligence of young writers out of hand.  Since I've outlived Shakespeare, as well as a host of other literary geniuses, that would mean that I should stop reading them - an absurd idea.

By Heart and by Ear

I'm still digesting the experience I had of playing a 3 night gig last week.  A friend of ours took this video of us playing "Softly as a Morning Sunrise," and I'm pretty satisfied with the way it sounds (not with the quality of the recording).
That's a song that I know by heart, backward and forward, and you may notice that the music stand in front of me is empty.  When I soloed, I knew just where I was in the song, and I could hear the relationship between what I was playing and the tune and the chords.  But most of the time, even though I know a song pretty well, I'm afraid to play it without the notes in front of me, and I know that's a deficit in my playing.  It means I'm using my eyes to keep my place in the song instead of using my ears.
By now I know a lot of songs by heart, and the expression is extremely apt.  My unwillingness to trust my heart, as it were, and play the songs without the written music in front of my eyes, is holding me back musically.  My dependence on my eyes cuts my ears off from my heart, and my playing is intellectual rather than emotional and natural.
What's strange to me is that when I play a song that I do know well by heart, like "Embraceable You" or "It's Only a Paper Moon," if I've started to play the song from the written notes, I find it almost impossible to tear my eyes away from the music and launch myself into playing it by ear.  I have to learn to trust my heart and my ears.

Another Night at the Craft Fair - the Challenge of Thinking in Music

The second evening of playing went even better than the first one.  I was more relaxed, but I was still playing with the intensity that comes when you play in public.
Improvising music is one of the most challenging activities I know of, and I'm not sure it gets easier as you improve at it.  Obviously some aspects of it do get easier.  You know the songs better, so you don't have to make an effort to remember them.  You gain in confidence, so you have more control over what you're doing.  You develop familiarity with chord patterns and rhythms, so you're not baffled by a half-diminished chord or a minor major seventh.  But the closer you are to mastery, the more you demand of yourself.
In the beginning, when I was struggling to improvise at all, I was glad when I just managed to follow the harmonies and begin and end on time.  I still get lost occasionally, but usually I know where I am in the song, and I'm working on playing interesting riffs, coherent solos that build, giving variety to my playing - so things aren't really any easier.  On the contrary.  It's harder for me to satisfy myself.
In some moods I think that it's too bad I came to this rather late in life.  If I'd learned as many songs and known as much about jazz when I was a teenager, I'd be struggling less now.  On the other hand, it's amazing that in my late sixties I can do musical things that I couldn't imagine doing ten years ago.  It's important to grow at any age.
Playing a fast-moving sport like tennis, hockey, basketball, or soccer probably demands concentration of a similar kind, though, never having been much of an athlete, I'm only guessing.
What it takes is thinking in the language of music as you play, the way you think in a language as you speak. 
A few years ago I took a course in musical cognition at the Hebrew University, and I got a lot out of it, though I think I barely scratched the surface.  I know that there are people with high musical aptitude, the way there are people with high mathematical or verbal aptitude, who hear, retain, and imagine more than ordinary people.  My own musical aptitude is high enough, I guess, for me to imagine what it would be like to have the extraordinary musical gifts of a great musician, and that's a positive thing.  But when, for example, I read about Shostakovich, sitting down and writing out the score of a symphony that he'd composed in his mind, without trying anything out at the keyboard, I am infinitely humbled.
The intensity of improvising in public (not that there was ever a big crowd listening to us) for a couple of hours last night took me a little closer to the state of musical awareness that a truly gifted musician has.  I could barely sleep last night.  Music kept running through my head, the tunes we had played, and musical ideas of my own.  The intense attention I needed while we were playing stimulated my brain.
Ordinarily I hear music without listening to it as carefully as I do when I'm playing.  Maybe it's a defense mechanism: if I always listened to music that carefully, I would be overwhelmed by it, and I can't really afford to be overwhelmed by it.  There are so many other demands on my life.  But I welcome occasions like these, which give me a glimpse of a higher musical plane.

Am I Good Enough to Play for People?

For years now I have been playing almost every week with an Israeli pianist named Ra'anan (the name, not all that common, means "fresh").  We mainly play for our own enjoyment, working on songs for quite a while, playing them in different tempi and rhythms.  We have played at parties now and then, and prepared programs and played them at informal concerts.  But I know that we're not all that good, compared to professional musicians.  Last summer we played in a couple of restaurants, and they didn't ask us to come back.  We were too loud!
Through a friend of his wife's, Ra'anan got us invited to play at the Jerusalem Craft Fair, which has been going on for the past week or so.  The Craft Fair is a major event, drawing thousands of visitors, and there are four entertainment venues, including a major outdoor stage where the top singers perform.  Ra'anan and I were asked to play in the most inconspicuous of those venues, in an alley that goes between artists' studios, the only part of the Craft Fair that's permanent.
We located a drummer in our age range, a retired gentleman named Moshe who has gone back to music after a career in business, and we rehearsed intensely for a couple of weeks, meeting at Moshe's house during the few hours at noon when he knows that his neighbors won't mind hearing him pound on his drums.
The rehearsals weren't all that encouraging.  Ra'anan was very edgy and intense, and Moshe wasn't used to playing with us.  But after a couple of weeks we were at least listening to each other.  However, I recorded a couple of our sessions and didn't like what I heard.  My own playing was weak and mechanical.  There are so many excellent saxophone players around, why should anyone listen to me?
I became extremely nervous as the day of our performance approached.  Meanwhile, our gig was extended from two nights to three, which also didn't please me.  One night would have been fun, two nights became a kind of responsibility, but three nights turned the engagement into work!  Rather than being enthusiastic, I was apprehensive.
We had our debut last night, and it went so much better than I expected, that I'm amazed.
We prepared about 30 songs and figured out simple arrangements for them.  We mixed standards like "A Foggy Day in London Town" and "Dream a Little Dream of Me" with a few Israeli songs by Sasha Argov, Matti Caspi, and Yoni Rechter.  We played for about two-and a half hours, total, and people stopped to listen to us and even applauded.It often happens that I play better for an audience than I do by myself or in private, just with other musicians.  Once I'm up there on the bandstand with a horn, there's nowhere to hide, so I let myself go and play.

Our Record Player

Some things drag on and on.  Finding a turntable so that we could play all our old LPs was pretty low priority, and after everything was supposedly in place, we still couldn't do it.  Our amplifier doesn't have an input for turntables, so we had to buy a pre-amplifier, and the one we got had a terrible hum.  But yesterday, at last, I installed a new pre-amplifier, and the hum is almost inaudible.  To celebrate we put on an old mono [!] LP that I have had for years: Arthur Grumiaux playing the Bach unaccompanied violin partitas.
I thought, while listening: if I were a Musician (I am a musician, but not anywhere near the level I mean when I use the term "Musician" with a capital 'M'), and I could play a work like the Bach partitas with the beauty and depth that Grumiaux brought to his performance, I don't think I'd ever want to do anything else. 
I feel something similar about the Miles Davis record of "Kind of Blue."  Once you've played that way, where do you have to go as a musician?  I still have the LP, but I played it so much when I was young, that I doubt that it has any life in its grooves.

Fear of Dogs and Religious Faith

This morning, as I often do, I took our dog Kipper, who is neither large nor ferocious, to the hill near our house that somehow got the name of Bible Hill.  I let him wander around while I sit with a notebook and write about what's on my mind.  I was there at about 7:15.  The breeze was cool, and I had a lot to confide to the pages of my journal.
A few minutes after my arrival, a heavy Haredi woman and four large daughters lumbered up to the hill, saw the dog, and hesitated.  I assured them, the dog doesn't attack, he's my dog, you have nothing to worry about.  They proceeded, and, indeed, the dog had no interest in them.  He never got closer than fifty meters, though he did look in their direction. 
Before they had gone a third of the way on top of the hill, fear overwhelmed the girls, and they retreated, leaving the hill and its wonderful view of the Old City to us.
I was sorry that my dog spoiled their little outing, but I'm not responsible for their irrational fear of dogs. 
On the way home, I thought of what I should have said to them: "Do you think that God will let you be attacked by a dog?  Don't you have faith that He will protect you?  You obviously only believe in a God who punishes, not one who protects."  But by the time I thought of that, the women and her daughters had left Bible Hill, and so had Kipper and I.

Incendies - Important Film

Last night we went to see Incendies at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and were deeply moved. Viewers who don't live in the Middle East would definitely get involved in the human (melo)drama of Canadian twins of Lebanese descent who discover the tragic truth about their origins. For people living very close to Lebanon - indeed I spent four or five months in Lebanon during the 1980s as an Israeli soldier - the film has more than human interest. I'm not sure whether an uninformed viewer would know the difference between Christian and Muslim Arabs, between Lebanese nationalists and Palestinian refugees, and so on. But my wife and I and everyone else in the Israeli audience did.
The film ends up by expressing the hope that love can overcome the painful past and the hatred that motivated so much killing. That might be possible in Canada, but it didn't seem as if the Lebanese Christian women, whom the young heroine met in her search for her family's past, were ready for reconciliation.
Seeing the brutality of the civil war in Lebanon on the screen, I wondered how the people of that country can bear the burden of the past, how they can avoid harboring deep resentment, that could only break out in violence whenever public order breaks down again.
Certainly a film like that doesn't leave me very hopeful about the possibility of reaching a stable and long-lasting peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. I'm afraid there's too much bad blood in our past.
But the issue of "bad blood" is not only a problem here in Israel-Palestine. The world is sodden with bad blood in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda, in Iraq, in Algeria, in so many places that it's pointless to try to mention them. Just think how long it has taken to overcome the rift between north and south in the United States. After 150 years, has the wound truly healed? Reconciliation is no easy project.

Prayer for the Sick - Hard to be Happy

During the Shabbat morning service, we recite a prayer for the sick, a paradoxical prayer, in some ways, because on Shabbat you aren't actually supposed to ask God for anything. In typical Jewish fashion, we make a rule that is hard to obey (don't ask God for favors on days of rest) and then find a way of doing it anyhow.
In many synagogues, the rabbi or cantor reads a long list of people whose names were given to him earlier, and in other synagogues people come up to the prayer leader and whisper the name to him, so that he can say it out loud. This is a rather boring custom, and in our synagogue a woman recites a general prayer for the sick, and individuals silently recall the people whom they want to bless.
I have a lengthening list of people whose names I say to myself (I don't think anyone else is listening in on my thoughts) during that prayer. The list is shortened occasionally, when one of them passes away.
I remember Kathy G., who has been battling with Parkinson's disease for a decade or more, Andrea P. and Jean-Claude J., who both have multiple sclerosis, Philip H., who has such serious cancer that he doesn't know whether he will live for another year or just another month or two, and Eli S., who has been suffering from schizophrenia for at least twenty years. Now my wife reports that her friend Ziva is very ill with leukemia.
As we head for our late sixties, more and more of our friends and relatives are going to get sick and die, until it's our turn. So, although there are wonderful moments of joy in our life, on the balance, we can't say that we're happy.
Rejecting the moments of joy because the overall picture is so bleak would be like not turning on the heat in the winter, because it's so cold anyway.
Recently we saw a documentary about Jean-Claude, an avant-garde musician who has come to that through rock and roll and jazz. He suffers from his disease, and yet he manages to salvage moments of joy. The film is full of those moments, mainly when he's playing the bass. He accepts both the pain and the pleasure. He has no choice about the pain. It comes with his degenerative disease.
"Courage" is the wrong word for his attitude.
You could look through the thesaurus for a long time before you found the right one.

Down to the Bone - an Upsetting Film

If you ever want a clear demonstration of how drugs can ruin a person's life, this film is it. The main protagonists of this film are working class white drug addicts living in rural New York state, not stereotype people of color living in urban slums. As a result, the middle-class white viewer can't say to herself: it's not an issue that affects my kind of people.
Since I believe that the criminalization of drug abuse is a policy disaster, making the problem much worse that it would be if cocaine and narcotics were legal, but controlled somehow (I don't pretend to have a clear idea of the correct policy), this movie was a challenge to me. However, without making an issue of it, the movie also shows that some people can indulge in occasional, casual drug use without becoming dependent (at least in the case of cocaine, marijuana, and alcohol), while others become addicted. So I would say that addiction is the problem, not drugs per se.
I still believe that if the money that is currently spent on enforcement, plus the money that would be generated in tax revenue if selling drugs were legal, were spent on rehabilitation of the minority of drug users who become addicts, drugs would do less harm to society than they do today. But I know that drugs are far from benign.

Trivial Junk?

That's the stuff I wouldn't even want to share with myself!

Writing in Pen and Ink

A couple of years ago I threw away years and years of journals that I had been keeping, and I'm glad that I did it. Recently, though, I've begun writing in notebooks again, using a fountain pen. The act of writing satisfies me. I enjoy filling up the pages.
Will I ever read what I'm writing? I doubt it.
Will anyone ever be interested enough in me to read it?
Who cares.
The value of the writing is in the writing, even getting a bunch of trivial junk out of my mind by putting it down on paper.
Occasionally the germ of a poem has emerged on the pages of my notebook, or ideas that could be developed, if I had the urge to develop them.
What about a book called: "How to Expect the Unexpected?"
I rather assume that no one in the world is reading the stuff I put in this blog. It's kind of like keeping a journal and leaving the drawer unlocked, half hoping that someone will snoop around in it, but being careful not to put anything too revealing about other people into it.

Fingertips - a Surprising Discovery

My pottery teacher keeps telling me to use the tips of my fingers to control the clay, and not the flat pads, and I am making an effort to do that.
That effort led me to discover that I also use the pads of my fingers for typing on the computer keyboard, as I am now, and for playing saxophone. So I'm trying to change that, too, because using the tips rather than the pads gives you more control and sensitivity, but it's hard to unlearn a lifetime habit.
It makes me wonder why I developed that habit in the first place.
Very often, changing something very small, like consciously using your fingertips to type (which means curving your fingers rather than keeping your hands flat), can be the key to changing something bigger. Who knows where increased sensitivity and control of one's fingers can lead?

"Radical Judaism"

I first met Rabbi Arthur Green in the fall of 1969, at Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Mass. Since then he has gone on to be a leading academic in the field of Jewish Studies as well as a religious leader: first the head of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary in Philadelphia, and, recently, the founder and head of a new rabbinical seminary in the Boston area. Nevertheless, I first met him as "Art," and I can't think of him as Rabbi Green or Professor Green. Though we share a last name, we are not relatives.
In 2010 Yale University Press published Radical Judaism, which grew out of the Franz Rosenzweig Lectures, which Art gave in 2006. The book was of deep interest to me for personal reasons - my acquaintance with Art and my admiration for him - and because I have been negotiating and renegotiating my own relation to Judaism throughout my life.
Unlike Art, who made a profession of his personal struggle with the demands of Judaism, I moved to Israel, partially so that I could think about other things and take Judaism naturally - which has turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would.
Radical Judaism is a theological statement by a scholar and thinker who has done the serious work that I never put my mind and heart to. It is a bold and honest book, totally without sanctimonious posing, an effort, as he says toward the end, "to rethink our most foundational concepts - God, Torah, and Israel and Creation, Revelation, and Redemption, and to ask how they might work in the context of what we really believe in our age."
My own difficulty with Judaism has been reconciling a strong emotional commitment to being Jewish with an equally strong (or even stronger) inability to believe in God. I enjoy participating in prayer, and I don't believe a single word. From his writing, it is clear that Art doesn't "believe" the words of the prayers either, though he makes them stand for what he does believe in, something I can't do, because I haven't figured out what I believe in and don't ever expect to.
Art's way of remaining religious is what he calls "mystical panentheism," the belief that God is inseparable from the universe, not exterior to it as a creator, but identical with it, permeating it, and that the Whole, as it were, is greater than the sum of its parts, or, that we have within us a holy place that is connected with the holiness of the entire universe. He also admits that his belief is not one that can be demonstrated philosophically, claiming that theology is more akin to poetry than to rational thought.
I'm not sure I can follow Art all the way in that direction, but I am more sure than ever that pretending to "believe" is no way of living as a Jew.

Footnote, the Movie - For a Local Audience?

If the new Israeli movie, "Footnote," comes your way, you should see it, though seeing it here in Jerusalem is unlike seeing it anywhere else in the world. The movie is about a closed world within a closed world: the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University. But it's about a huge subject: the relations between fathers and sons.
The film obviously means a great deal more for someone who lives here, and who could more or less identify every location in the film, and who knows people very much like the characters in the film, than it could for someone abroad, who doesn't speak Hebrew, who doesn't have the slightest idea what the Jerusalem Talmud is or why anyone cares about its text.
But I think that most successful works of art address a local audience first, and, if they're good, a broader audience can eavesdrop on the local conversation. At the recent Jerusalem film festival, we saw movies from Albania, India, Israel, and Greece. I know virtually nothing about Albania and very little about India, but those local films, about local people, with personal problems, were accessible to me and meaningful to me. Obviously I didn't have the flash of recognition that a local audience would have had upon seeing a familiar landmark, but I could identify.
The best art, I maintain, is intimacy overheard. That's why an intense group of creative people, living close to one another, can stimulate great work: the poet writes first for the poets around him, the painter paints first for his painter friends, the novelists critique each other's manuscripts. That personal interest in the work going on in the group creates a potential interest for the audience.

A Pessimistic Vision

Sometimes the people in the world, especially the decision-makers and activists, seem like automatic toys that keep moving in exactly the same direction until they bump into something, fall over a precipice, or their battery runs out. Especially here in Jerusalem, people follow their own agendas, come what may, no matter what the consequence, no matter what the facts may be.

Pottery: It's Been Three Years

I went to my weekly pottery lesson this morning, and it occurred to me while I was there that I started just three years ago. I enjoy it so much, that I can't help wishing that I had begun long ago, that I hadn't dropped the pottery class I was taking at Greenwich House because I was the only boy in it, that I didn't get deep into pottery when I was a young man, instead of following an academic, literary, intellectual path that hasn't really taken me anywhere I actually wanted to go.
Of course the wise part of my mind dismisses those fantasies out of hand. Not only that, instead of lamenting, "Why did I get to it so late?" it says: "Isn't it wonderful that a man in his sixties could have begun a totally new activity and gotten involved in it?" I might discover other wonderful activities before I get sick and die!
Anyway, could anyone, looking back at his or her life from the middle of its seventh decade, say,"The path I took was right for me; I am just where I hoped to be when I began"? Wouldn't that be rather dull? I knew just where I wanted to go, I found the right road, and I got there. Where are the surprises?
My skill in pottery is definitely increasing, and I'm actually pleased with some of the things I've made - though, as always, the maker is more aware of the flaws and shortcomings than anyone else. I'm improving at making the clay do what I want it to do - though I'm far from consistent, which doesn't actually displease me. Sometimes the fun lies in exploiting an error, in turning a project that was supposed to have been a jug into a bowl.
From the start I had the attitude that I wasn't trying to produce perfect pottery. You can buy perfect factory made dishes and vases in any department store. A handmade pot should look handmade. Also, in decorating the pots, I know my limits as a painter. If I tried to do dainty flowers and birds, they would just look silly.
Finally, I keep reminding myself that the whole point is that I'm doing it for fun, for the pleasure of doing it - not a trivial kind of pleasure, but the deep pleasure of molding useful and sometimes handsome vessels with my hands, the sense of communication I have with all the people who have made pots for thousands of years.

Mark Strand

I always feel slightly guilty about writing poetry while I am not an enthusiastic reader of poetry. On our last trip to America, three months ago by now, I went into a huge bookstore in a shopping center near our daughter's house, and browsed through the poetry section. Compared to the number of books about achieving salvation through better orgasms, there were relatively few books of poetry. I ended up picking out four, including David Ferry's translation of Gilgamesh and New Selected Poems by Mark Strand.
I have only begun to browse through that rich volume, and I expect to stay with it for a while. I am enjoying the way Strand brings out the strangeness of experience and his almost plain, almost clear language: "Nothing will tell you/ where you are./ Each moment is a place/ you've never been."
Last week my friends' twenty-year-old son died in a diving accident, a meaningless and devastating stroke of terrible misfortune. I have a good idea how heavy the burden of grief will be for them, year after year. Such tragedies make it impossible to find meaning in life, just as they make it imperative to do so. Poetry dwells in the chasm between impossibility and necessity.
In a poem of my own I wrote:

The Company of Misery, March 2011

I watched a dying hedgehog stagger on short legs.

Troubled by that sick animal, whose pain
Was nothing to the pain of Japan at that moment –
Earth heaving like water,
Water pounding harder than rock.

Japan is distant,
The hedgehog is right here at my feet,
Too feeble to flee.

I could no more help the being near me
Than the people dying far away.

Does Anyone Need Five Saxophones?

Aspiring amateurs (who can afford it) invest in equipment. Maybe Mr. X takes boring pictures, but he has six cameras and seventeen lenses and a gadget bag full of filters and a closet full of tripods and lights. So I have five saxophones, two clarinets, four or five recorders, and a bunch of ethnic instruments.
Of the five saxophones, I mainly play two: the baritone and the alto. I play the baritone in a big band, and I practice on it a lot, because I'm not exactly the strongest player in the band, and I have to keep my level up. I've been playing alto because it's in the same key as the baritone, so if I learn a song on one instrument, I can play it easily on the other, without transposing it again. I bought an inexpensive soprano about a year ago, and I play it on and off. My tenor has been in the hands of an instrument repairman for ages - that's another story. The fifth saxophone is an old C Melody saxophone that's sort of for sale, but no one in his or her her right mind would buy it, so I plan to take it back from the shop where it's been on sale, and maybe I'll try to overhaul it myself. If I do, I'll also invest (finally) in a C melody mouthpiece rather than use a tenor mouthpiece.
As for the clarinets, one of them is a metal G clarinet that I bought in Turkey, and I can barely play it. The key system is an old-fashioned one, even older than the Albert system that German clarinetists use, and the finger holes are so far apart that I have to stretch my fingers to play it. The other clarinet is an ordinary French wooden clarinet that I bought used a few years ago, and I play it now and then - I'm always surprised that I can play clarinet at all, but that was my main instrument 50 years ago, and your fingers don't forget.
Oh yes, I almost forgot my EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument), a wind-controlled synthesizer with 100 built in sounds. I've been playing it fairly regularly with my wife (who plays piano) and our friend, a flautist. We play trios, from early baroque through classical. If I tried to play the trios on a saxophone or clarinet, I'd have to transpose, and, since we're mainly sight-reading, I couldn't really play well enough. With the EWI I don't have to transpose. It has flute-like and oboe-like sounds that fit in pretty well with piano and flute. I can even play a cello part on the EWI (it has a 7 octave range!), though reading bass clef is hard for me. Oddly, I can read bass clef easily on the piano, but not on an instrument that usually uses treble clef. When the cello part is written in tenor clef, I really lose it.
For quite a while my strategy was to concentrate on the baritone, to decide that was my main instrument and to work on it. But when I pick up another horn, I find I enjoy playing that one too, so I'm thinking of adopting a different strategy: going from horn to horn every day that I practice. Two days ago I played clarinet, yesterday I played the soprano, and today I plan to play the alto or the baritone.
Even though a saxophone is a saxophone, as Gertrude Stein ought to have said, there is a big expressive difference between the soprano and the baritone - obviously - and each of the horns offers something different to the musician.
I find that playing the EWI is essentially different from playing my acoustic instruments, probably because neither the sound nor the pitch depend on my embouchure. There's something abstract about playing it, and I conceptualize the music differently.
I certainly don't need five saxophones and an assortment of other instruments, but if I had to sell all but one of them, I don't know how I'd choose.

Technicalities - the Craft in any Art

Every art has its component of craft: the skill and knowledge about the materials and equipment that you use. As a serious amateur musician, I'm always trying to improve my technique, my sound, and my grasp of music. When we visit the United States -- we just returned from a twelve day visit to our children and grandchildren -- I often order are saxophone reeds, and much more occasionally saxophone mouthpieces (because they're quite expensive and tricky - you have to try them to know whether they're any good for you) on the Internet, because it's expensive and inconvenient to have them sent to us here in Israel, and there is a huge variety available on the web that no local music shop can afford to carry.
Maybe as much as ten years ago, I bought a beautiful looking metal mouthpiece for my baritone saxophone. It has a very live tone, but I've never managed to master it, to play in tune with it, to control the dynamics, to keep the tone consistent, and that frustrates me.
Theorizing that the reeds I was using with that mouthpiece were too hard, this time I bought a box of five rather soft reeds. For anyone who doesn't play a reed instrument, I should explain: the bottom line is, the harder the reed, the harder you have to blow, and the more pressure you have to exert with your lips. The advantage of a hard reed is in the solidity and intensity of the tone, and the disadvantage of playing on a soft reed is that your tone can sound flaccid, and you lose projection and volume.
Mouthpieces are the other end of the equation. The wider the tip opening (the distance between the end of the reed and the tip of the mouthpiece), the harder you have to work to get a sound out of the instrument. But if the tip opening is too narrow, your sound is choked, it's hard to play loudly, with projection, and sometimes you can even stifle the sound by squeezing the reed and mouthpiece together with your lips and blocking the air completely.
All of this is highly individual. There is no single good combination that works for everyone. In the reed-player jargon, the combination of instrument, mouthpiece, and reed is called a setup. If you go to one of the hundreds of saxophone sites on the web, you'll see descriptions of the setups that various famous musicians use. The (ridiculous) idea is that if I played on exactly the same brand of saxophone, with exactly the same kind of mouthpiece and reed as Sonny Rollins, I, too, would be able to play as well as he does.
The prudent approach would be to find a setup that works for you and stick with it. But musicians are, quite properly, never entirely satisfied with their sound. Just recently someone sent me the link to an interview about practicing with the late Michael Brecker, where he talks about trying new equipment. So I have approval for my restlessness. In the same vein, my late musical guru, Arnie Lawrence, often said that you shouldn't keep doing what you already do well. The only way to advance in your art is to keep trying new things and taking the risk of sounding bad for a while (if you're a musician).
This notion isn't limited to the craft and art of playing a musical instrument. If you're a poet, and you always write blank verse, try rhyming for a change. If you're a painter who specializes in watercolors, try acrylics or oils or printmaking.
Does art begin where the technicalities leave off? Perhaps, but without mastering the technicalities, one never leaps out into artistry.

The Old Country, as it were

So here we are at our daughter's temporary home in Rockville, MD, making up for grandchild deprivation. Every time we visit the United States, the country where we grew up, I feel odder and odder about being here. We are out of touch, even though we read the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and we follow US news on the web, and we have dozens of friends and relatives with whom we remain in contact.
But what is Rockville, MD to us? Our daughter and her family are returning to Israel this summer, and the apartment they've been living in has a temporary feel to it - hardly any pictures on the wall, hardly any investment in the place beyond the utilitarian. Compared to their house in Israel, which is decorated and cared for, this place seems a bit like a motel room they've been camping out in.
Our son, by contrast, has settled in here in the United States. He attended university and law school, and, after working for a big firm for 6 years, he's gotten a job with the US government. He and his partner have bought a charming house in an area in DC called Friendship Heights, and they've been working steadily at making it their home.
But the Washington area was never my home, and I only know my way around here tentatively. But it's a city of tourists and transients. No one really expects you to know where you're going.
The season doesn't help me feel at home here: winter. We don't really have winters in Israel, not winters with days and days below freezing, not winter with snow permanently on the ground, not winter with cold, dry winds, not winter that makes the landscape bare and abstract.
The whole point, of course, is to be with the grandchildren, to be in their company, to hear their voices, to enjoy their energy, to watch them move with the grace and enthusiasm of healthy children, and to be thankful that they are healthy children whose parents make sure they are stimulated and enriched, without being controlling.
We're going to go to a modest ski resort in Pennsylvania with the family today. I don't imagine I'll see a lot of them! I'm not sure how much fun a sexaganarian non-skier will have up there, but I'm going along for the ride.