There, in the waning light

Encountering a particular space that once held the greatest intimacies and the most undefined forces: the landscape where one grew up; a landscape, in this case, where the landscape meant livelihoods and seasonal shifts and crop changes; where the openness meant encounters that were almost always mediated by the car and driving; where the sensibilities were unknowingly taking shape.

This time the car is a rental. It is appropriate. This return is as tourist. It is not just that the land belongs to others. It is that the landscape as possession has passed, so that passing through brings the concentrated hour, or two, of borrowing; taking up the land's light and shapes for the sake of remembering palely the old sense of connection, the time when the turns in the country roads were taken with unthinking reflex and intuitive ease, when habit made true memory unnecessary. And this work of memory that dictates the navigations -- around the old town plaza, to the house that ancestors built just after the Bear Flag revolt, along certain backroads that once led to the houses of girlfriends -- also makes the present details all the more present. For while in this kind of transit, a return and something absolutely present and new, those details are filled with the clarity that comes from stripping away habits of non-seeing, of not having to hunger and hold to that which remains, dying there, in the waning light.

"The identification of immediate with past experience, the recurrence of past action or reaction in the present, amounts to a participation between ideal and the real, imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. Such participation frees the essential reality that is denied to the contemplative as to the active life. What is common to present and past is more is more essential than either taken separately."

--Samuel Beckett, Proust

The intensity which I wanted

(Painting by Felix Nussbaum).

I had been bothered by a secret weariness
with meter and regular stanzas
grown a little stale. The smooth lines and rhymes
seemed to me affected, a false stress on words and syllables--
fake flowers
in the streets in which I walked.
And yet I found prose
without the burst of song and sudden dancing--
without the intensity which I wanted.
The brand-new verse some Americans were beginning to write--
after the French "free verse," perhaps,
or the irregular rhythms of Walt Whitman,
the English translations of the Hebrew Bible
and, earlier yet, teh rough verse of the Anglo-Saxons--
seemed to me, when I first read it,
right:
not cut to patterns, however cleverly,
nor poured into ready molds,
but words and phrases flowing as the thought;
to be read just as common speech
but for the stopping at the turn of each line--and
and this like a rest in music or a turn in the dance.
(I found it no criticism that to read such verse as prose
was to have a kind of prose,
for that was not to read it as was written.)

--Charles Reznikoff, "Early History of a Writer"

Denying al-nakba

The marking of Israel's sixtieth year has also brought the circulation of its shadow, the Palestinian remembrance of al-nakba, or the catastrophe of massive displacement that followed the 1948 war.

Beersheba 1948:

Post-independence Beersheba,
with Leonard Bernstein, November 1948:

Not surprisingly, there is the continued insistence that their independence not be woven tight to the price Palestinians paid then, and pay now. Israel is currently trying to pressure the United Nations to avoid using nakba. This attempt to influence the common "lexicon" is nothing other than trying to banish the very idea of a historical view of the Palestinian plight from general thought. It is indicative of the worst contradictions that saturate the problems in Palestine. Israel's Foreign Minister Livni suggested that the path for a Palestinian today is paved by forgetting yesterday -- saying they will have their own independence day when the word nakba falls from their vocabulary. But Defense Minister Barak reminded every Israeli that "there is no future for a nation that does not know its past." Israel cannot shape the vision of the past from sheer rhetorical gamesmanship. There is too much already written into the land, like the script their security fence and West Bank bypass roads, and the more obscure traces in the shape of deeds for homes lost or the diaried memories of refugees.

That such history might disappear is the revolutionary dream. That the myths of a clean creation must be so obscenely protected is the impulse of weak nationalism. Of course, the past remains, and it seems increasingly present beyond the limited use of emigrants, exiles, and refugees, people who are not so absent as to have their past erased and scattered, but living reminders. The "right of return" for them may be framed in moral terms, as a just insistence, but that is a political matter. It is an object in a struggle for recognition since it, as a right, must be recognized. Without being part of an agreement it has as much substance as the claim that other should not remember their losses, that should agree to displacement. For that decision to forget would also be a political choice and not a human one.

Human catastrophes, however, are not so easily negotiated, and so one begins with recognition that not only are such memories powerful, but that they belong to all of Palestine, whatever its future formations. In other words:

"No national 'right,' as in organic and pre-given. No self-determination, as in self-sufficiency, of nations. To [this] we can add . . . no singular selfhood. Rights . . . relies on a fully rational, monochrome, conception of the person. I must know who I am when I claim them. But if the mind is not its own place? If my claim delves into the depths of my own history, trawling through my dreams and nightmare, to create its own law? The image we have of displaced persons tends to be cast in terms of endurance, survival, the fierce adherence of all human creatures to their own life. It bears no investigation of inner worlds. I suggest instead we see peoples on the move at least partly as sleepwalkers, trundling through each other's dark night."

--Jacqueline Rose, "Displacement in Zion," The Last Resistance

Not for Victory

In Israel to help celebrate its 60 years of statehood, George Bush called upon a familiar national symbol for Israelis. As Haaretz reports it:

"In an historic address to Knesset on Thursday, U.S. President George Bush reiterated America's commitment to Israel and said his country was "proud to be Israel's closest ally and best friend."

Bush, on a three-day visit to Israel on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, told a special session of Knesset that "Masada will not fall again," in reference to the Roman-era desert fortress which he visited earlier in the day.

The site is a national symbol in Israel of Jewish fighting spirit and self-sacrifice against powerful enemies and overwhelming odds."

The sacrifice, according to the adopted chronicle by Josephus, was mass suicide. The Jewish revolt led by Bar Kokhba (or Kosiba), and crushed by the counter-insurgency onslaught of the Romans, died by its own hand in the isolated hilltop fortress.

Seeing no way out but through battle or living with the finality of defeat, each took the life of the other in succession until one remained; one left to tell the tale. The hilltop bastion thus became a mass grave and a witness/survivor story of destruction and willed death.

Raised as a special site in the twentieth century's project of developing and promoting a national consciousness, the site of memory and commemoration was finally excavated and "restored" in the 1960s. Masada, as a site and symbol, is a thoroughly modern creation. To invoke it as the standard symbol of national will, and to say at the same time that it will not fall again, both mythologizes the present through the desperate affect of the tragic past and cuts the present free from the painful price held in the story of destruction. The modern nationalist myth uses death as a glorious symbol of sacrifice for the military spirit of the (eternally) besieged nation. The promise made to undo its tragic course, to refuse the hard lessons buried in the myth, comes from a hard, terrifying wish for a final victory.

If Masada exalts the beauty of battle, Yavne stands for the gesture of just escape. In that story Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is smuggled out of Jerusalem in order to surrender the political center for the sake of a new spiritual one. The Second Temple was destroyed but a place of Jewish learning, Yavne, was established in flight, in the spirit of survival rather than self-sacrifice to the enemy.

Charles Reznikoff's poetry, which always tempers loss with presence, with life and remnant and true remembrance, with the true notion that the saving gesture was not in sacrifice but in continuation through memory and adjustment and adaptation, serves, for today, as antidote to the all this:

Not because of victories
I sing,
having none,
but for the common sunshine,
the breeze,
the largess of the spring.

Not for victory
but for the day's work done
as well as I was able;
not for a seat upon the dais
but at the common table.

--"Te Deum"