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.

Electronic Shakespeare

When you read on a tablet, you don't feel the heft of the physical book, the feeling that the end is in sight as the stack of unread pages on your right (with an English book) gets smaller, and the bulk of read pages on your left gets bigger. I knew that when I got to The Tempest, I was close to the end, and I was surprised to find out that Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida still awaited me. Unless another play is hiding behind Troilus and Cressida, I'll have read through the complete works in a little while.

Timon of Athens, which I'd never read, turned out to be something like a hybrid of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" and the Book of Job, and Titus Andronicus (I can't imagine anyone else reading that play unless it was assigned in a course) is as violent and gruesome as some of the movies and TV series I've been avoiding.
Clearly some of Shakespeare's works are of literary interest today only because they were written by the genius who wrote Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream. But even in the sub-standard plays there are passages of breathtaking beauty, of course.
Of course?
You try writing a passage of breathtaking beauty like John of Gaunt's praise of England from Richard II, not one of Shakespeare's greatest plays:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry, Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

The project of reading all of Shakespeare offered me a fine demonstration of my ignorance (about British history, for example, and of Elizabethan English) and has left me with a lot of questions, whose answers I might pursue, if I'm not too lazy.
One of these questions involves the connection between dramatic convention and real life. One of the main drivers of plot in Shakespeare's plays is the conceit of love at first sight.
The moment Romeo lays eyes on Juliet, he forgets all other women. The moment Ferdinand spies Miranda (in The Tempest), he knows she's the woman for him. In Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers keep falling in and out of love with each other, on the spot, thanks to magic - perhaps a humorous comment about the dramatic convention.
I don't know the history of this convention. It certainly goes back as far as Jacob and Rachel in the Bible and remains powerful in contemporary fiction, drama, and film. So maybe there's something to it, and it's not just a literary convention.
In general, there is something to almost everything in these plays, meaning that, even though some of their concerns are local and time-bound, Shakespeare manages to present them in a way that enables us to identify with them, five hundred years after he wrote them. 
Perhaps I should be distinguishing between conventions like love at first sight, which he uses to push the action forward - insults to honor, intrigue and manipulation, deceit - and universal human concerns. 
Take Cymbeline, which involves a bet on a woman's chastity, rather offensive to twenty-first century readers. Still, if the spam messages I keep getting, advertisements for services to find out whether my spouse is cheating on me are indicative of anything, the issue of trust in relationships is perennial. 
Needless to say, the themes of ambition, revenge, honor, trust are not peculiar to English society at the end of the sixteenth century. Conventions change, but people have always been people, so I assume (and hope) we'll keep reading and staging Shakespeare.

A Hospital Lobby, Flute Practice, Turning my Back on Someone in Need

A week or so ago I found myself sitting in the lobby of a hospital with nothing much to do, waiting for my wife to emerge from a medical examination, so I started scribbling in my diary, something I do only occasionally. 

I used to write lengthy entries in diaries, and I kept them for years, but when our son Asher died, I threw away all my old diaries. I knew I would never reread them, and I didn't want to leave cartons full of banalities for posterity. His death made me feel very unimportant.

The paper in the diary I'm writing in now is hand-made and thick. I bought it in Mumbai. I write with a fountain pen, and it's fun to see the way the ink is absorbed in the paper. I write by hand because I enjoy the act of forming the letters. I get no physical pleasure from typing and seeing the letters pop up on my computer screen.

Since Asher died, I find myself prone to worry about illness and accidents – not to myself so much as to the people I love. But I wasn't worried about the results of my wife's examination. We were focused on the unpleasant preparations and never thought about the possibility that it might reveal some horrible disease (fortunately it didn't).

Recently two vital people we knew, both younger than we are, died of cancer. Our age cohort is thinning out. 

Once I was an optimist.

* * *

In my diary I started writing about the flute I bought at an exorbitant price, an unjustifiable extravagance, perhaps, but I'll try to justify it nonetheless.

How much longer do I have to play flute until I die? Not that many years. I'm sure I'll never be as good a player as I'd like to be, but why not give myself the pleasure of playing on a good instrument while I can still play? Besides, I'm a fairly rich man, though I find it hard to write those words (my mother always thought of us as “middle class”). I could afford to buy a professional-level instrument without affecting our standard of living at all – so I did it. Anyway, the flute will always be of value, and my heirs can sell it.

I wasn't really sure when I went to the music store in Tel Aviv that I would upgrade my flute, but the moment I played two or three notes on the instruments the salesman showed me, I could feel the difference between my decent instrument and the excellent ones I was trying out.

I know the flute is not going to sit in a corner untouched. I've become obsessive about practicing. Every day I go through a methodical routine to improve my tone and articulation, and this slow and careful work has carried over to my saxophone playing. I hear more.

* * *

I have been exposed to two different approaches to practice. My flute teacher, Raanan Eylon, is a stickler for detail and aims at control of the instrument. He has decades of experience and a coherent method for attaining that control. A couple of years ago I heard a fantastic young guitarist say, “practice the same thing every day” – a corroboration of Raanan's approach. If you practice the same thing every day, you can monitor your progress.

However, the late Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, if I ever had one, said, “Don't practice! Play!” The approach of Raul Jaurenga, a brilliant tango musician to whom I was exposed this summer, is similar to Arnie's. He said you should start out by falling in love with your instrument, spending time every day just exploring the sounds you can make.

The point is to combine the two approaches. Arnie was a master of his instrument, and Raul plays the bandoneon with incredible skill. Raanan, with all his emphasis on sound production, aims at enabling his students to play a melody communicatively. When I play something badly he says: “I don't understand.” Technique and feeling must go hand in hand. Feeling must provide the drive for acquiring technique, and the acquisition of technique enables the expression of feeling.

* * *

As I was writing this I got a phone call that makes all this thinking about music feel terrifically self-indulgent (as if reading about the refugee crisis in Europe or the asylum seekers here in Israel weren't enough to make flute practice a bit like feeding brioche to the poor). Two distant relatives of mine have gotten themselves in a bind, and I've become involved in their problem even though, objectively (if there is such a thing), they are not my responsibility.

I am not prepared to do what a more charitable person would do, which is to take them into my home, lend them money, and care for them until they can get onto their feet. I would admire someone who did that, but I have to admit to myself that I'm not the kind of person I would admire.

I feel guilty and angry at the people who put me in a situation where I feel guilty.