Swimming Laps

Everyone agrees that we need to exercise, though finding advice about exercise is a bit like consulting a rabbi (if you're the kind of person who asks rabbis what to do). If you want to be told that moderate exercise, some walking, is enough, you can find a web site that tells you that, and if you want to be told to do serious workouts to strengthen your core muscles you can find plenty of web sites that will tell you how to do that.
When my knees were younger, I jogged pretty regularly, and I enjoyed that. Whenever I see runners, I envy them. I can't do it anymore. I can still walk pretty far, but sometimes it hurts.
I've never used exercise machines. I have unexplained, deep-seated resistance to them. I occasionally force myself to do simple calisthenics. But I know it's not enough. So, with a fair amount of pushing from my wife, I've begun to swim.
I've worked myself up to doing 20 laps (1,000 meters) of crawl without stopping, and I manage to do that at most twice a week, sometimes only once.
Swimming is not exactly the most stimulating activity one can indulge in, and the main thing on my mind when I do it is keeping track of how many laps I've done. I try to be aware of the sensations, the feel of the water, the bubbling sound of my exhalation, how tired I am, how strong I am, whether my legs are cramping, whether I manage to hit a stride. It's a form of meditation.
I guess I should aim for three times a week, but it takes me an hour and a half to get to the pool, change, swim, shower, dress, and go home, and I begrudge the time.
I have the option of buying a yearly membership, but so far I've been buying 11-entry tickets. I'm nearly finished with the second ticket. I'll have to decide whether to buy another one or to commit and buy a membership. It comes out cheaper, but will I really use it enough? I'm still not sure.
I go in mid-morning, when the pool isn't crowded, and most of the other swimmers are on the old side, like me. I have distressing thoughts. When will I start looking like the other old men in the locker room? Maybe I do already. I'm 71 now, and I can swim 1000 meters, but how long is that going to last? Am I going to be coming to this not so well maintained pool as long as it's open and I'm not too decrepit, every year doing doing less and less, until I can only paddle weakly on my back like an arthritic walrus?
But that applies to all the stuff I do. Someday, not too far in the future, I'm going to be too sick, too weak, too demented to keep them up.
I console myself: the best way to keep that time as far off in the future as possible is to stay as active as possible now. Anyway, the future is more or less out of one's control.

Do You Love Your Flute?

A few months ago a very persuasive salesman in a Tel Aviv music store sold me a Sankyo silver flute that cost more than I was prepared to pay at the outset, and one that is better than I am. It's a professional level flute, and I'm an amateur level flautist. I kind of regretted the purchase for a day or two. Music stores abroad sell the same model of flute for a good bit less money, but I'm here in Israel, not abroad, and it's a bad idea to buy a musical instrument without trying it out. Besides, there is a rationale for buying from a local brick and mortar store, as they are called, rather than from a web site: it's in my interest as a musician in Israel to have instrument stores thrive and import a large variety of fine instruments.

I've been playing the new flute for a couple of months, and my playing has been improving. And if it's not improving, I know that the instrument isn't holding me back. But surprisingly, I don't love my flute as much as I love my saxophones. When I open the case of my baritone saxophone and see it lying there in the blue felt cushioning, I feel a surge of love for it. The Freudian term is "cathexis": "the investment of emotional significance in an activity, object, or idea."

I feel zero cathexis for my electronic equipment, my computers and my smart phone, or my stereo system. I feel close to zero cathexis for my car, even though we just treated ourselves to a new car this winter. But I love my saxophones! (Don't ask me how many I have.)

I am working on falling in love with my flute now, hoping that the love will be reciprocated.

Literalists, Figuratists, and Terrorists

I don't know how far I can pursue this thought, which has been percolating in my mind for years. Suddenly I see it as connected to religiously inspired terrorism, but I don't know whether I can articulate the connection.
In my years of association with religious people, I have come to see them as being of two kinds: the literalists, who believe in the absolute truth of their religious creeds, and the figuratists (of which I am one, if I can call my self religious at all), who understand that their religious observance is metaphorical and stands for an ineffable spiritual truth (which is shared with other spiritual traditions).
Literalists believe, for example, that God revealed himself at Mount Sinai and gave the Torah to the Israelites, just as the event is described in the Bible. Religious people of the second type might say, "something must have happened at Mount Sinai," or that the story is a myth -- not a "mere" myth, but a powerful, formative myth. For figuratists, the historical truth, if it is ever discovered, is of little relevance. It doesn't matter whether the exodus from Egypt actually occurred. What matters is that this is the way the JeWe see wish people understands itself, and the way Christianity subsequently used the story of the Exodus, and its use in literature, drama, painting, and so on.
There is no common language between the first and second kind of religious people. The figuratists understand religion as a collective work of art, created by communities over centuries. Thus, since religions are works of art, their inner ideational structure (one can't use the word "logic" here) is the associative, creative, mysterious structure of dreams. Religions, for us, are systems of symbols, and symbols are not real the way nature, for example, is real.
The literalists live in the dream world of religion, and it is more real to them than what we figuratists call "objective reality." And this is the meaning of the violence of religious extremists, not a rational meaning, but an expressive meaning. They do not draw any distinction between what we figuratists call symbols and empirical reality. Everything is symbolic.
We figuratists are mystified by religiously inspired violence, because it doesn't serve any discernible rational purpose. It is not calculated and political, like the Russian encroachment on the Ukraine. Nor is it what a figuratist would call symbolic, in that for the literalists, everything is symbolic, which means that nothing is symbolic in contradistinction to what is not symbolic.
We figuratists see the killing of innocent people, whether they happen to be standing next to a terrorist when he is assassinated by a drone, or whether they are attending a concert in Paris, as an act of unspeakable cruelty. For the literalist, we are all actors in a cosmic drama, and our lives and deaths are part of the plot. Killing people off is hardly different from getting rid of a character in a TV series.

Creativity and Dreams

In real life this painting, "Family of Saltimbanques," by Picasso, done in 1905, is huge. On my last visit to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I stood before it for a long time, and now, too, when I see it in miniature, on the display of my computer, I can barely take my eyes off it, though I want to write something about it.
The painting has been on my mind because I might be giving a paper on "Translating Creativity," if my proposal is approved, at an upcoming professional convention, so I've been wondering how one recognizes creativity in the first place. To me, this painting is a, so extreme, indeed, that comment seems superfluousn extreme demonstration of artistic creativity, from which one can learn almost everything one needs to know about it.
We are most creative in our dreams, and this painting has a dreamlike quality: six figures are placed in a non-landscape, A fat middle-aged man in a reddish costume looks at a tall young man, dressed in a harlequin costume, who stands with his left hand behind his back and looks away from the man in red. A young girl in a ballet costume stands at the younger man's right, looking down and away from him. A boy, wearing only a bathing suit, approaches, carrying a barrel on his shoulder. He is almost in the center of the painting, but stands a bit behind the fat man. Another boy, younger, wearing a turquoise jacket, open at the neck, stands in a kind of dancer's pose, and, in the lower right corner of the painting, looking away from the five other people, sits a young woman in straw hat, whose gaze is also turned away from ours.
Who are these people? What is the connection between them? How did they get there? What are they doing? Where are they going? The painting only raises questions. Yet, despite all the unexplained things, Picasso used items of visual vocabulary that ordinarily mean something to us: costumes, poses, facial expressions, recognizable objects (a basket of flowers, a jug, a cask), a kind of landscape. These figures probably had personal meaning for Picasso, and they are meant to have personal meaning for the spectator as well, personally meaning that Picasso didn't state explicitly (that's part of what's dreamlike about the painting): parents and children (perhaps), youth and maturity, the impossibility of communication among people in their own worlds? We are invited to project our own issues on these figures.
Picasso was well-versed in the history of painting, and he must have thought, for example, of Watteau, whose painting of these "Italian comedians" is nearly as mysterious as Picasso's painting. What is the meaning of the statue behind the figures in the upper right of the painting? Why are these five actors standing where they are? (Five, because the face of a black man peers out between the left shoulder of the Pierrot figure and the musician who is bending over).
Watteau's comedians are dressed in recognizable costumes, like Picasso's saltimbanques. The dream is not entirely incoherent, the way some of my dreams are, but the choice of the figures, their pose, their situation all obey a dream-logic.
Dreams are notoriously difficult to remember, which may be why we need art: to evoke our dreams, or even to replace them.
As I meditate on these paintings and write about them, the city of Paris is reeling from cruel terrorist attacks that have left more than a hundred people dead, well-planned attacks that are, in their way, also a demonstration of creativity, also the acting out of a dream-logic.
I'm not sure what to do with that idea.

Some Thoughts about Hunger and a Fat Dentist

Understanding hunger is important to a lot of people in the developed world, because we believe we are too fat. If only we could be less hungry, we would eat less food, and we wouldn't be so fat.
I'm not thinking about Hunger with a capital 'H,' the hunger of people who don't have enough food at all. I have never experienced that kind of hunger, and I pray that I never well.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels on Yom Kippur.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels for emotional reasons, or just the simple pleasure of eating something sweet or salty, a brownie or some potato chips.
I'm thinking of the hunger that well-fed people feel at the hour when they ordinarily eat.
That hunger, as I experience it, is a kind of discomfort, not more acute than, let's say, having tired feet at a museum, and a lot less acute than a bad headache. But it's real discomfort.
That kind of hunger is different from other types of discomfort, because it's so easy to get rid of it. You don't have to take an analgesic. You don't have to sit down and take off your shoes. All you have to do is eat something.
I get very hungry before mealtimes and especially when, for some reason, I am
eating later than usual - much more hungry than a lot of people I know (like my wife).

Years ago, when I attended some meditation retreats, I was taught how to deal with discomfort while meditating. Instead of saying to yourself, "My back really hurts," you're supposed to think, "I have a sensation in my lower back," without classifying it as pain, and thus as something to avert. You're supposed to give the sensation your attention, to locate it, to feel it - and then, as happens in meditation, your mind will wander, you call your attention back to your breathing, and the sensation in your back no longer distracts you.
Can one do the same thing with hunger? It's seven o'clock, say, and you ordinarily eat at seven, but tonight you're going out and you won't be eating till nine. Your abdomen is telling you to put some food inside yourself.
You have several options: you can give in and eat something, you can hold out, not eat, and become grouchy, or you can examine the message your abdomen is sending you: Where is the discomfort situated? How acute is it? What other sensations are connected with it? Usually I eat something.
In our society, while we are constantly being bombarded with advertisements for highly caloric, unhealthy foods, nevertheless being overweight tends to be regarded as a moral failing. When I was a child, my mother routinely referred to our dentist with the almost Homeric epithet of "that fat pig," as in, "I have an appointment with [name withheld, even though my mother and the dentist are long deceased] today, that fat pig."
Fat or not fat, he was a great dentist.

I Don't/Can't Understand

A train of thought.
After living in Israel for more than forty years, I have come to realize that I will never understand this country. The society is too complex and diverse. The history is too deep and mixed up. People's agendas are strongly conflicted. And the symbolic importance of Israel in our own eyes and in the eyes of other people in the world - friends and enemies, both categories too extreme - not only makes it impossible to stick to facts, it also makes it impossible to figure out what the facts are.

Then I started thinking about the ways a society understands itself, if it's at all permissible to think of societies as entities that can understand or misunderstand. As individuals and as members of a society, we use the stories we tell about ourselves to persuade ourselves that we understand ourselves. Historians, social scientists, journalists, authors, film-makers, religious leaders, politicians, and so on to create and modify these stories. But every story is partial, selective.
This also applies to the stories that individuals tell themselves about themselves, to explain to themselves who they are. At bottom, I think people are as helpless to understand themselves as they are to understand the society and world they live in. We don't know enough, even about ourselves, to understand ourselves.
This thought led me to realize that all understanding is partial. No one can know enough to understand fully even the tiniest thing or event. For what would full understanding be like? To understand a water molecule in my blood, do I have to know how hydrogen was produced in the big bang that purportedly marked the beginning of the universe? Millions of biological processes transpire in our bodies every second. Can I ignore them if I want to understand myself? Only if I think that what goes on in my body has no connection with what goes on in my mind and heart.
Experimental science has moved toward understanding phenomena by keeping every variable but one constant, so as to understand how that variable works. But as soon as you put that variable back into the context of the whole phenomenon, you get stuck in a wilderness of details.
Also, of course, things are constantly in flux.
This line of thought led me to understand [sic!] something I heard years ago about the importance of metonymy - the part for the whole. Think of an ordinary film. In two hours or so, it takes you through a much longer period of time, years, perhaps. It does so by persuading us that the little scenes of life that we see on the screen are representative of much great chunks of experience.
This is true of all our experience of other people and of life. We have a conversation with someone and feel as if we know that person. We spend a week in Paris and feel as if we know the French. We know four or five supposed facts about someone and imagine we know their life history.
It's upsetting to think that all knowledge is partial. We want a story that will explain everything perfectly and leave no loose ends. So, inevitably we will be either deluded or disappointed.

Duty Calls - Do I Have to Listen?

Two things fall together: my reading of Shakespeare and the High Holidays.
Honor is one of the main themes in Shakespeare's plays, especially as the duty a person has to self-image. A noble person is expected, and expects himself, to behave nobly. Honor is worth more than life itself - or at least that is how the ideal is presented in the plays. Betrayal is both of the trust placed in one by others and of the standards to which one holds oneself.
Honor is not a particularly Jewish value, at least as it plays out among the European aristocracy. If you insult a rabbi, he's not going to challenge you to a duel.
But the theme of the High Holidays is not unrelated to the idea of honor: we are deeply aware that we have sinned, we promise to better ourselves, and we ask God for forgiveness. A Jew who takes her identity seriously sets high standards of behavior for herself. Failure to live up to those standards is almost inevitable, but one has the duty of trying.
The sense of duty applies in almost every area of life. One has duties toward one's family, one's friends, one's community, one 's employer, and oneself. The sense of duty is both contractual and emotional, to the letter of the law and to its spirit.
In my work as a translator, I often have no personal connection with my clients. I have never laid eyes on some of them. My obligation to them is strictly professional. Yet I feel a personal obligation to them - to do the best work I can, on time, even to do things that aren't expected of me like checking the spelling of authors' names. I try to live up to what I see as professional standards, and it's always a pleasure to encounter someone else who has that attitude.

* * *

Here's a great example of high professional standards:
Recently Dror Ben-Gur, a musician and saxophone repairman, told me about the Japanese repairman who instructed him in New York. Dror once arrived a few minutes early for a session and found a flute lying on the repairman's table, completely in pieces.
"How are you going to finish putting that together in time?" Dror asked.
"Watch this," said the repairman, and in five minutes he had assembled the flute down to the last screw and spring.
"How did you do that?" asked Dror.
"In Japan," the man replied, "we learn to work in the dark!"

* * *

Some people appear to have no sense of duty, while others suffer because their sense of duty is exaggerated. On Yom Kippur you're really not supposed to say to God, "I did the best I could," but for the sake of sanity, while it's a good idea to aspire to improve, one must be aware of one's limitations and accept them.