Oh How I Longed

How I wanted embraces then, and how far I was from embraces
Then; embraces were far distant, lying on the grass,
Stroking caressing a well-scratched
Head of a dear one, eyes of a dear one, and oh how lips met
In embraces. The tenderness flooding through hearts
Beats only mine, like raw, an organ hung
To the wettened flaps, the flopping meat,
Much moistened veal. But oh how I long to
Feel every tenderness, every touch of finger-tips,
Warm when hot, and irksome with sweat, and how I lived
Through embraces – embraces with words, scattering across
The ear like the sweet, smooth sliding fingertips, and how I longed
To either join in or write it all down, distant and alone in embraces
Of only sound. Oh how I longed for embraces, either to run my hand
Across a well-worn, flat-skinned belly or else, to, touching pink and tender skin,
Be touched in turn; and oh how I longed for embraces – the whisper of grass
On the glands, the press of moving legs, and hands, yes, hands
Yes, how I longed for embraces.

There comes a point when a man can no more read than he can write, and when every word seems equal to every other word, and every experience, composed of mere words, is ready to collapse under his grasp as if it were made of no finer stuff than sand, and even metaphors slip away, being somehow irrelevant and useless, and entirely without shame. When I look around me, I am struck by the sheer inadequacy of things, places, and people, an inadequacy that redounds back always to myself. It is I, sleepless and alone, who am inadequate; my straining ambitions cannot be contained in a body, and yet I am bound to limbs, bound to words, bound to flesh. There is something endlessly unsatisfying about being human, which, if we would only allow ourselves time to think about it instead of running in every which direction, might strike us wholly and in the very core of our being. That all sounds, all sights, and all smells, not to mention memory, knowledge, and the very stuff of thought itself, are all composed and only made of singular atoms, convulsing and repulsed in an infinite void, is a thought to chill the spine and freeze the mind. What is this wide space of being? Where every atom, alone in its isolate, penultimate self strikes the final chord that moves the whole line, domino by domino, into being and touch and sight? Can this cruel world, infinitely large and infinitely distant, be endured?

All I know is that I am hated; I am hated and derided, disliked and disapproved. By whom? Faces, faces of the mass down below, faces labeled with words, faces always beyond and yet always flickering in the cold vision of my mind. Meanwhile I sit like a little crutch on the smooth chair, caught up in the expansiveness of it all; sleepless, timeless, collapsing into nothing when all I want is being. But not this being; that is the irony of death - we fear life. We want - a life, a particular life - not ours, but not death. Are these the only alternatives, to live or to die? Non-being seems scarcely worse than being, but scarcely better.

When I write, Im haunted round by many authors. Their whispering voices, as if craving the immortality they lack or the mortality I have, surround me as if I were slaying beasts for blood on the edge of Acheron, and each brings his toll to the resounding upper steel. It is a steel earth, it is a steel ground, all metal; the things springing out of it, little green things, can hardly hold our attention.

And yet what an amazing thing man is. I am not surprised that people worshipped him long after and before he was a god, the God. Is it less blasphemous that we should raise the creature of infinite complexity whom we do not understand, even to this day, in every department of every university - long lines of men accustomed to study! - to the status and level of a god, the God, than that we should lower him to our standard, lower him to our breath? But God is something like him, God breathes him into the air, breathes the wind into his body; he forges steel, he bends the earth, the dominion, that is domination, of all creatures winged or flying, earth-bound or crawling, swimming or circumscribed to sea, these are all his. And yet with a body like Narcissus' and a beauty like Appollo's, has he no justice? Am I infinitely alone? And yet I too am a statue - as he is - a lonely statue. Life devolves into ruins. Are you ever afraid that we are nothing more than a group of statues, or - true to the earth, true to death - that the statues we see lying round in broken columns round cracking temples are the truest portrait, most faithful invocation of our souls?

I like a certain rhythm in language. When I write, I like the phrases to come together in way that is pleasing to my ear, that flows; so much so that I forget all about meaning - I will repeat myself endlessly, just to hear something again that I like. When I was a youth, I would say, "Hello" out loud to myself, on a sunny day in the middle of the playground, just to hear my voice, to check that I could still speak. How fresh everything was then. And how good to be alone. I created entire worlds for myself, manufactured them, returned day after day. Always I was in the center of a vast cosmos to be saved, always threatened with the temerity of timorous danger. Now I create worlds in words; but they are somewhat more lonely, somewhat more empty; always I am caught by the rhythm like the smooth rising and falling of waves, and left on shore by the sea, waiting out, as if I were trapped on an island, abandoned, beached.

And for all that, what a curious thing it is, solitude. Because solitude cures nothing. To wander around on one's own is to be in pain. But I can't find a way not to - I cant find a way to connect with others. I try desperately - but it is not a simple matter, I think, of being with other people. One can be lonely, as they say, in the middle of a crowd. Because the crowd doesn't turn towards you, the crowd doesn't notice you, and I think that if a pike came through your heart and your blood bled all over the floor, they would hardly think but for fear of themselves and it would always be their loss. But it cannot be my loss, not my loss to them.

What ridiculous creatures we are, or want to be. For love of one another we would go so far as to put each other inside ourselves - the intimacy of a surrounding embrace, being contained like being wombed, returning to birth in making life - and yet, for all the effort, if we could have it that one skin enter another, if we could crawl into the deep folds of another human being, but for his own pleasure, I scarcely think he would know we were there. Or his pain. Wars, loves, sorrows - everything is communicated but incommunicable, and in the space of this I can only feel awe or emptiness. If it is awe, then I immediately turn to God, some feeble recollection of a substance, the thing that makes all things; if it is emptiness - well death is hardly more bitter, and hardly less rewarding - or it couldn't be less rewarding. Couldn't possibly be. I have heard it said that there is a certain providence in the fall of a sparrow - but I think it is my providence, it is my own mind, rambling and turning in on itself, and consuming everything in its wake - or it is a metaphor of the dying sparrow or it is just the collision of atoms in a world colliding with atoms, by which I mean my mind.

Give me whatever excuses for withholding your love. I can take them. I have embraced a world of pain before, and I can do so again, and I even expect that it will get worse, for all things degrade with time. This expectation, this bitterness I can bear - for there is always in becoming accustomed to such things the chance and hope of a still heat that still, nonetheless, is heat; passion is hardly less consuming, but much more sweet to be a burning, smoking forest of rage and pain than to be left cold and alone. Serenity is akin to solitude, but much more precious and more rare. It is repose in oneself. I wish I could rest without my hatred of the wide world, the wide world in front of eyes I can't efface, and the wide sound behind ears I can't tear, and the wide touch behind feelings I can't dismiss, and a love and a need that will not go away.

Send grieving word to Aurea, first, most splendid daughter of the dawn,
For it was she who rose with rosy cheeks and full, moist lips
To turn the seething tips of poisoned shaft from Aragon, her own late love;
Just as a dove flies through the sweeping meadows where thressyla grows
In powdery white tufts extending with a purple vibrance like the setting sun
At dawn of death, so she crowns the pallid corpse with flowing tears
Like flowing Phlegython to burn his cheeks and prays for Lethe’s sweet
Waters; for there is a hill deep in Acheron, secluded in among
Numberless hills in ghostly procession – Taramount, the highest of the giants
Leads them in procession and they chant a sullen song that mixes
With the groaning brook. No lack of lotus here, and corpses mix
With lazy drift-wood ‘til they tumble off the cliffs where forgetfulness
Mixes with that river of burning pain. If you see a corpse wandering here
In full array, still garmed with tattered clothes, his hollow sunken eyes
Will take you with his longing, rape you from your life, and it is enough
To make you jump into the waters, cool and flowing to the neck, – Oh virgin!
Such was the coldness of your gaze like ice that blazes
Across the fields with harsh winds, in the winter when snow like a thousand mosquitos
Buzzing round sucks out the bloom of youthful life. Flowers fell like garments,
Purple roses cut by errant breezes, and your tears would neither cease
Nor yet did your face dry, like one of those crags, endlessly in torment
By clashing shores. Still I have seen you when the light of the rising sun
Crowns your pallid features, and your long locks tumble down
Upon the youth you mourn.

Iliad 1.1 - 7

The rage, sing goddess, of Peliadan Achilleus,
Wrathful, that set thousands of Achaians into pain,
Hurled to Hades many brave souls
Of heroes, and made them prey for dogs
And all fierce birds, while the will of God was done
When first they stood apart in strife:
Atreides, king of men, and god-like Achilleus.

I'm about to run off to class. I have to do 90 pgs. of reading for French tomorrow, read several articles for Latin, finish Paradise Lost...I'm going to go blind! I love the Greek reading we're doing (though I'm ashamed to admit it...loving a rhetor is loving rhetoric); Virgil is done. I'm posting the following poem -- the title is perhaps a bit heavy handed. The diction is archaically paratactic, but I like some of the images...it doesn't go anywhere. If anything, it's ekphrasis. If there's anything I really am trying to get to work, it's the ending images. There should be a sentiment of beauty and loss hanging over the flowers, and colors gradually reveal the blazing sky that shines on Lancelot, just as he catches sight of Gwenevere. Never before did his armor gleam so bright, but it seemed malevolently so, as if God conspired with the sun to make him first among men; his beauty yields to death, and so the flowers to the shades of Hell. Otherwise: I'm not sure if the poem is finished.

Les Fleurs du Mal

Infernal dreams, unearthly triumph, all Hell
Raising hollow cry I sing, that rings and rings
Through long caverns where shady things
Slide across the brittle rock and wasting sludge
Glugs in falls and jets across the burning chalk,
Then delays in marshy bogs that feed
The sword-like reeds among which
Flowers grow: red shining like the ether
First in sunset, when the mournful swallow
Sings her lonely lays; gold growing in among
The sweetened yield of bees; blue like azure sky
That burns across the sullen mid-day sun,
And yellow shining like that sun, and silver
Like a gleaming knight, like Lancelot, when first perceived
White lovely sleeves or peach of Lady’s skin as sweet
As grieves him to behold; and the Lord of all who knows
Makes him shine the brighter, just as leaves become
All colors, rustle in the sapless wind, conspicuous in fall;
And so the rosy clouds dispersed are wider lost than rosy dots
Small among this slight bouquet.

Another busy day: four classes (three conferences and a lecture), therapy, a performance, orchestra rehearsal (so make that five classes) and a rehearsal for the upcoming Bachannalia on Friday (at 4 in Prexy -- if you know where that is, you should come). There will be more rehearsals through the week, plus I have a concert on Sunday (and consequently a dress rehearsal on Saturday). Other than that, I have to find a job and a place to live over the summer; oh, and I have three papers to write. ;-)

Speaking of writing, I'm thinking of paring down my prose -- again. Ok, so I go through this "my prose needs work" thing every few months, and inevitably my complaints are flowery, a surplus of mannerisms and repetitive sound. What I want is something straight-forward and without complication; I want to really speak to people. Perhaps it's because I crave attention -- but I want to describe things and I want people to read them and respond without leaving me sly comments about how stupid I am. At the same time -- I want to like my prose -- I want my prose to be something that's well constructed and not just easy to read, but at the same time worth reading. I'm not writing a newspaper here, to paraphrase Mallarmé.

I suppose that one of the reasons I've tended towards Ciceronian periods and "Chateaubriandisme" (a great adjective -- I never knew it existed until George Sand...it means flowery romantic shit prose, apparently, although I personally like Chateaubriand, despite his "Genius of Christianity") is because I secretly fear that my life is boring, so I try to write about nothings that have nothing to do with me and dress them up in frosting and garnish, my desperate plea always, "Please read me, please...look, I have apodosis and sly allusions".

There's a blog-writer who calls himself Geek-Slut. He writes about his sexual escapades. It seems like every week he has sex with at least three or four different guys. To me, that seems life. I mean, however sordid it is, he actually has adventures -- he has something to talk about -- the "what have you been up to lately?" portion of the conversation doesn't end in, "not much, you?" -- he launches right into a catalogue of lovers that would would make Homer jealous. Now, I don't want a catalogue of lovers; but I do want to be able to say, "I went to the beach and saw something shiny that changed my life; I saw God rolling in with the tide." But I don't have the license to say such extravagant things; that's not the nature of my life. My life is workaholism (hence Reed College), vanity, and dashed expectations; longing and melancholy stained through with pleasure.

One of the reasons I'm so obsessed with writing -- I want to begin a great work. I want to begin my masterpiece...something that will sing to the world (presumptuous yes, vanity -- time will tell); I want to have produced, at the end of my life, one perfect crystal cut to quality. My own Sentimental Education or my own Eclogues. I keep trying to begin, but I keep failing. I read (whilst perusing the biographical note in a volume of Pound's "Cantos") that Ezra tried to begin his Great Poem again and again, but never succeeded until late in life, and then perhaps only marginally. Ezra Pound, whether I like it or not, is my model. I haven't read much of him, but I know who he was -- an amateur linguist who had an obsession with great literature and an ardent desire to connect with the past; in short, a studied romantic. OK -- you lit majors out there, prepare your hate-mail. But that's who I am: an admirer of the past, a collector of dead tongues; dazzled by outmoded styles and cliche, looking for my voice, my vice, a word, the Word.

A Field of Crimson Rose
 
Dieu, faites couler de nos lévres une nouvelle chanson
Long have I suffered, long have I plucked
The stems in vain, and watched the green
Stain ripe my rough, red skin.  Long have I stretched
To the cold winds, and let my voice
Extend across the plains.  Burning flame;
Hear the thunder; I fear the cold, cold rain. 
Une goutte de l’eau
Chancelait au fond de mon abîme,
Et tombait comme éclate la peau
Douce de mon chagrin.
What is this scent of rose, deuce and sweet
That wraps my fevered lips?  My heart
Grows in soft repose beneath the grass,
And the soil rises to the tips
Of my bleeding, blooming fingers: take this,
The harvest of my songs, and bring it
To the airy deep, to the place where shadows
Flicker in the mixing light, where rivers
Quiver and fall the crossing heights, and tumble both
To sticking, gripping pitch.  Feel black
Break with the glowing red, erupt in fire, and dread
The inspiration from above:
A field of crimson rose.

Will you cry for them, soft and subtle tears? You were sitting on the edge of a hill, legs stretched long out over the little tufts of stubbly grass. The city stretched into the land, the land stretched into the sky, and the sky was hanging like a pall, like a mask, like a thin strip of gauze, all across the blanketed earth. The slight shudder of wings clasping liquid, in clouds, and moving among the clouds, and the clouds drifting white and lazy like coagulated drops of cream dispersing through a clear, hot stream, approached your ears. You heard music, just a faint voice, in the distance, like blood trickling down from lips, or a stream poking through the collosal rock of a sandy scrape-and-tear projection, whipped in the extension of air. It is cold in the high reaches, and a wind coming down from the sky shudders you. The voice is not speaking in any language, the world is murmuring and you don't understand what it's saying. Each word is a tremble flowing into the next word and crying into a cacophony of three-hundred sounds that coalesce into a single, strong, imperceptible whine and a buzz. There are little dots of red way down yonder. There will be bees buzzing among the flowers -- the flowers in spring-time, the trees peaked out like bouquets, lovers' hands offering fruit. Teeth sinking into golden apples, races and love. Did you proffer her wine at the banquet? Her hair decorated with pink garlands, and the slight of satin waving across her breast, and falling and scraping the ground. The smooth stone rocks back and forth on sandled feed, impatient whines of conversation, a snatch of a memory whistling through the air that you can't quite tear apart. And then the long tables, the white canopies, and big red bowls of plastic punch. A flimsy plastic ladle pours a glass. This is not the sweetness of wine (which is bitter, but only for poets), and it courses down your chest and leaves a cold cess-pool in your stomach. All these things stretching up like a red eye-sore, or a long and tawny hill, breaking into crops of rock.

Where is the tall glass building? A tie hanging from a black-suited chest, and outside are stretching more buildings, and the McDonald's and the vegan who is serving lunch, thick slabs of cow. An eagle perches on the branch, picks, preys at the berries growing in poisonous clusters, stabbing with its beak like piercing, the spoiled juice flows sharply down the crag like drops of rain, slams upon a rat, curious in deception, and wings off. The endless flat tops of the city stretch out like the days and nights. Where was love in the city squares and the stretching lights across and down the streets? You followed her, vague promenades, always through a blue dress or a pink gown, always a tinceled scarlet of beauty hanging gems around her neck (her white neck) always under marble statues stabbing swords into the brazen air. Through great crowds of many vestments, and many heads, and flows of many thoughts. All pulsing, if you could hear the deafening roar like the crashing waves. One judgement attacking, another receding, who knows how many knives they've plunged into how many hearts in the dark of their fantasies? Its amazing that murders happen, not once or twice, but more often, only on paper.

Long vaulted cielings; the vault of the heavens, the sky constrained. She was no great affair. Black already peers through the windows like a ghost or a foreigner; long ranks of zombies, clutching bloody fingers, hungry; constant war is life; is there nothing to love? Not in bloodshot eyes. A scrawling pen. Many scrawling pens. Many fingers moving. A whole deafening valley of fingers moving; the dead dragging the dead dragging the dead.

And sitting by the banks of the river Chebar, I saw the dead come to life. They picked themselves up, they would live; some broke into mausoleums looking for artifacts; old priestly garments they stole from museums; others wore crowns; they stumbled about on the streets, or they stole bones from the graveyard and put together great wings, windless flapping, trying to fly like giant skeletons of old pterodactyls, and with many glittering rubies and emeralds on their fingers, and some wearing parchment and the scabs of Greek letters. Some lit fires and cracked their knuckles over the fires; some clacked their clacking joints in the aching cold. Beggars watched them and followed by example, took of their skins and collapsed in the streets, and stinking piles of flesh were everywhere. On the third night large boils developed under their chins that were no longer chins; deep rings beneath eyes that were no longer eyes; and the whole heap boiled and hissed like a viper, and red as a gardner, ready to strike.

Cry for Lila, cry; she had the folds of beauty like a perfect rose; she grew in a desert wasteland where the waters always trickled and every tree dripped with a dewy honey. There were violettes and lilies everywhere, and all the hills were purple. When she stretched out her hand, the music came to a high lull and everything was frozen; snowflakes drifted down, looped, glided, fell in each other on heaps gathering on heaps of promises, like the white silk folds of her dress that dragged on the ground. The earth is very frozen, black, and very, very deep.

The Soul

Does it exist in the deepest breast? Does it call and feed, both early in the morning when crepuscular dawn lifts her rosy mantle over the veiled and cloudy mountains, under the roaring and raging seas; and at night when the stars, shining in their brilliance, speak memory to the darkened skies?

A slight flame flickers -- or is it a roaring fire? This fire, descended from the sparks above, and yet infernally weaker, suffering, by degrees, its fall, rolls about a vast field of tumble-weeds, sparks forests growing thick with vines, and destroys the fields of flowers where the bees buzz in the heat of summer, swarming now around white lilies, now gathering pollen to make sweet honey, the dripping poetry of men's lips; the roses burn, red and blue with lilacs, green with greenest grass. Stare into these flames, stranger. What do you see? The reflection of your soul, your eyes?

Your eyes are glassy blue; your eyes are deepest black; your eyes are autumn brown. Stranger, who are you, gazing at the destiny of ages? Do you see the tall towers fall and crumble? Do you see the mist settle about the ramparts like ghosts? Do you see once proud man, clutching in skeletal hands (his breast-plate worn upon his chest) his rusted spear? Surely this was a time for stabbing, long ago; surely blood accrued and stained the dirt, stained the grass, stained the blue-decked fields; where once all was grassy space and grains waist-high, now is scuffle and muck and blood, and now is deserted and bones.

A finger, broken off, the slight bone of a thumb. What harp did you hold, what chord did you pluck? Did you sing songs, someday by the tumbling fall, when the ivy cloaked the cave especially thick, or the vine, growing green with new grapes? Did you sing love barely fresh, did you sing wine in a time of harvest? Did you watch strong men stamping across the fields in thick, broad steps, reaping and sowing grains, all kinds, the thick seeds and the small, in autumn and spring? In spring when the snows first melt and trickle in drops, through summer when they fall in rushes and even to winter when they still and clot, hanging a promise on the tapestried ridge?

A world-black space, cracked and speckled, the bottom receding into earth-brown, rising into peaks and promontories, stretching out into legs and hips and reaching arms; on the right, a child, perhaps no more than three years old (but millenia in terms of earth, and he never existed); on the right, the young but ancient mother. Or is it his sister? Swaddled in a cascading cloak that finally tumbles into a stream of vertical lines and ends with the support of two paw-like feet, separated only by two glaring borders from the brown fundament, but poised against the raw, black paint. Her hair is dark, and gathered together like a magnolia just budding from the soil-brown scarf wrapped many times about her temples. An ear, jutting like the handle of a teacup, interrupts her oily mass of hair, and it is interrupted, also, by the mountainous patterns (and stretching plains? -- but in any event, pure triangles) of the scarf, which, by consequence, begins to look (bonnet-like) a boat sailing small on the blackened mass.

Her lips are curved into a slight smile, and the space before nostrils and nose (a diagonal line from the temples (scarf-swarthed), diverging in a little jut) is lightly freckled, spotted with time. Her aubern face is not, in the least, fair by powdered makeup, but a certain natural glaze colors her features by absence of form (i.e. the jutting black). Beneath the cloak is a lined and wrinkled vest and then, her breast -- bare skin. How would you like to touch the voluptuousness of her bare skin? To trace the smooth idea in mind? The pulse quickens in the remembered sight of a lady. She, staring off into space, her empty gaze touching (like empty hands touching in the absence of presence), reaching out for a child.

Who is this child? If not for the gravity of a several squared and curved bench (pluming out into quills and peackock's eyes) she would fall into endless nothing. But she sits, hunched back, falling forward with extended hand, open, not grasping, and meanwhile tender limbs stretch strenuously toward her, across the divide. Is she mother? Is she sister? Is she the latent object of an erotic desire? Would you, small child, like to touch her skin, carress her lips? Do you see the reflection of a child in her eyes, do you see again your face, do you see yourself, multiplied throughout the earth in eternal birth? You see nothing, you think nothing; if a latent desire, then hidden, deep hidden in the smoothness of your skin, hidden like the numbers of dissheveled hair. And yet your eyes look out towards us, gazing as if into a mirror, a reproach. Lips curled into a slight sneer, hands almost like blocks, overlapping; the mother puts a single out with some generous care, but you stretch your entire little body until it might snap, and try to break the confines of your tomb-like chair. You want, and legs bend and push as if striking against a wall of solid black. Trapped out there in that mass; to be a figure; the absurdity of it -- an ancient Greek! Stressed with becoming, and waiting with a laid down burden. Is your tiny springing form, full of receptive, eager life, the cancellation of passive motherhood extending into darkness? The womb is ultimate death? But the edges of the circle are browned, and brown, and cracked with dirt, the solid earth. These shapes, a myriad of triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles; like the architecture of our bones and our bodies; make something of nothing and brew in our minds the bubbling stream of awakening sleep.

Today is a catch-up day. My parents have been in Portland this week, so I've been hanging out with them, going to restaurants (eating good food -- Indian, Italian, sea food, coffee, cakes, deserts), driving all over the place (we went up to Canon Beach) and generally enjoying their company.

WARNING: WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW IS AN EXTREMELY OFFENSIVE BIT OF PERSONAL MUSING ABOUT MY JEWISH HERITAGE. THESE ARE MY THOUGHTS ABOUT MY JUDAISM AT THIS PRESENT MOMENT. I DO NOT (AS IRONIC A THING TO SAY AS IT MIGHT BE) MEAN ANYTHING AGAINST ANY INDIVIDUALS BY WHAT IS WRITTEN BELOW. SINCE JUDAISM IS A VERY TOUCHY SUBJECT FOR MANY PEOPLE, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO READ WHAT IS BELOW UNLESS YOU ALLOW ME MY OWN THOUGHTS AND ARE WILLING TO EXAMINE THEM WITHOUT DECIDING THAT I OUGHT TO BE STUCK ON THE END OF A SHARP STICK. WHY, ON ANOTHER NOTE, SHOULD I PRESENT THESE OPINIONS ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE AT ALL? BECAUSE THEY ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND WOULD BEAR MUCH FRUIT FROM PUBLIC SCRUTINY WHEREAS, CONGEALING IN PRIVATE, THEY MIGHT HARDEN INTO A PERMANENT AND REVOLTING MASS OF PREJUDICE.

I offended my sister. Some of my views about Judaism...and I was mad at her. So I said some things I shouldn't have...I called her a Jew. She called me a traitor. I suppose I am a traitor. There is still a sour taste in my mouth from this past summer, the Orthodox Jews...I hate them. I hate their closed in world, I hate their stupid doctrines, I hate their neat lives and their little community enclosed and bound by tradition in which there is no one room for anyone else nor for the real world. And by extension, I hate all Jews who make being Jewish a special part of their identity -- it's the religion I hate, the religion, the whole rotten idea of a chosen people. It is not necessary in the world today; it is deadly.

There are those who think that one can be Jewish without believing in God. I think that's nonsense -- Judaism was born out of the Hebrew Scriptures and the observation of the "commandments"; the Jewish heritage is membership in an exclusive group of xenophobes who fervently believed they were the chosen people of God and who brought (it is a painful thing for me to say, but I think, in some respects, true) the hatred of others upon them through their own intolerance. As a national policy in the Hellenistic period, the Hebrew religion did not work -- diplomacy was, to the Israelites, an unknown art, and hence their downfall. Since then, the Jewish religion (which is, I think, a reaction to rather than the continuation of the Israelite cult, in the same way that Christianity is a reaction to the Israelite cult) has been remarkably succesful at maintaining a series of widespread (diaspora) communities that have taken little direct part in the world around them and have consequently brought upon themselves, through separation in times when separation was not tolerable, much loss of life.

Of course, there have been and are legacies that I identify with, that I do not abhor. The idea of a messiah, of a teleological end in history, of a final justice and perfection in man -- this is not to be taken lightly. Whereas some peoples of the ancient world saw civilization and life as an inevitable decline from resplendent order into rough chaos, a few Israelite thinkers, the prophets, dared to reverse the course of history and projected sorrow into the past with the burning of the temple, joy into the future. They recreated God in the image of time, and it was time that would reveal to them the face of eternity. The idea of a God perpetually present and absent produced much and beautiful literature, and the peculiar virtue of the Jewish people has been an attachment and devotion to the study of that literature. Even more has been produced -- the Jews are perhaps a people of poets; recasting old traditions in new and ever more beautiful conceptions; Sinai gave way to the Torah, the Torah gave way to Kabbalah, Kabbalah gave way to the mystic doctrines of the Hassids...

But I don't like what I've seen of modern Judaism. We are enslaved to the past. Moses has superceded God, the Holocaust has weighed down on our creative spirit, we are perpetually afraid, and we draw into ourselves. The orthodox memorize their scriptures and set them out in great detail in charts, drawings; there is almost a scientific precision -- but purchased at the cost of wisdom! For them there is some joy in their communities and their timeless rituals, frozen perpetually in place, but what is there for the rest of us? Guilt. We are ashamed of our culture, which is easily reduced to caricatures; we are ashamed of our scriptures, which contain much that seems backward and out of this world; we are ashamed that we are not Christians, or that we are not Americans; or we are ashamed that we are too much Americans, too much Christians. We are outraged that we were persecuted; we are outraged at our ancestors for allowing themselves to be persecuted; we are outraged that the world associates us with wealth; we are outraged that we are so wealthy; and yet all our friends are Jews, and yet all we talk about is Judaism, and yet whenever we comes across the word Jew in a book, even when the words are scarlet with revulsion, we feel a secret delight. We love, we have always loved, the spotlight.

I don't like my legacy. Why is it that the biggest quandary for modern Jews is intermarriage and assimilation? Do they think Judaism will disappear? It is historical fact; it can never disappear; or if it disappears it goes the way of all flesh. And what loss if it does disappear? Do things not become irrelevant? Do they not die? Is it responsible to place oneself against the mainstream for the sake of preserving something that drew its identity from its opposition to the mainstream in the first place? Individuality for the sake of individuality? And I have to say, I am angry at the Jews. I am angry at the Orthodox for sticking out like a sore thumb; I am angry at the cultural Jews for sticking out like a sore thumb; I am angry that everybody knows who we are, because we are Jews. That everybody draws attention to us, because we are Jews. And why are we Jews? Because we said we were Jews! And what if I don't want to be a Jew?

Then I am still a Jew.

Once a Jew, always a Jew. Because the rest of my people desire so fervently to preserve their Judaism and are so ardently in the lime-light, Judaism will continue forever. And as long as it continues, my life is in danger. There have been many of us who have tried to separate ourselves from the mass, heading towards destruction. But it is in vain to struggle against a stampede without being swept away! As long as Judaism continues, then, I try to separate myself from it, deny it, get it out of my system. But for the very reason that I must deny it, I am not free from it. And despite my fervent desire to...to assimilate, to become part of the mainstream, to join in with the rest of the world, that very desire brands me, now and forever, a Jew. And what is a Jew?