Forest Dark

The only book I had in English was Parables and Paradoxes, and after rereading the section on Paradise a few times, I looked out the windows and was struck by the thought that I’d misunderstood something about Kafka, having failed to acknowledge the original threshold at the source of every other in his work, the one between Paradise and this world. Kafka once said that he understood the Fall of Man better than anyone. His sense came from the belief that most people misunderstood the expulsion from the Garden of Eden to be punishment for eating from the Tree of Knowledge. But as Kafka saw it, exile from Paradise came as a result of not eating from the Tree of Life. Had we eaten from that other tree that also stood in the center of the garden, we would have woken to the presence of the eternal within us, to what Kafka called “the indestructible.” Now people are all basically alike in their ability to recognize good and evil, he wrote; the difference comes after that knowledge, when people have to make an effort to act in accordance with it. But because we lack the capacity to act in accordance with our moral knowledge, all our efforts come to ruin, and in the end we can only destroy ourselves trying. We would like nothing more than to annul the knowledge that came to us when we ate in the Garden of Eden, but as we are unable to do so, we create rationalizations, of which the world is now full. “It’s possible that the whole visible world,” Kafka mused, “might be nothing more than the rationalization of a man wanting to find rest for a moment.” R

David Ben Gurion

That evening I went to a dance class held in an old yellow school whose window frames were painted sky blue. I love to dance, but by the time I came to understand that I ought to have tried to become a dancer instead of a writer, it was too late. More and more it seems to me that dancing is where my true happiness lies, and that when I write, what I am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, I am never satisfied with writing. To write is, in a sense, to seek to understand, and so it is always something that happens after the fact, is always a process of sifting through the past, and the results of this, if one is lucky, are permanent marks on a page. But to dance is to make oneself available (for pleasure, for an explosion, for stillness); it only ever takes place in the present—the moment after it happens, dance has already vanished. Dance constantly disappears, Ohad often says. The abstract connections it provokes in its audience, of emotion with form, and the excitement from one’s world of feelings and imagination—all of this derives from its vanishing. We have no idea how people danced at the time Genesis was written; how it looked, for example, when David danced before God with all his might. And even if we did, its only way of coming to life again would be in the body of a dancer who is alive now, here to make it immediate for us for a moment before it vanishes again. But writing, whose goal it is to achieve a timeless meaning, has to tell itself a lie about time; in essence, it has to believe in some form of immutability, which is why we judge the greatest works of literature to be those that have withstood the test of hundreds, even thousands, of years. And this lie that we tell ourselves when we write makes me more and more uneasy

He spends a lifetime waiting, a lifetime on the threshold of the Law, and every attempt he makes to get in is always denied

Lying in my sister’s familiar bedroom, I fell asleep at last. When I woke again, it was into a homesickness that felt physical, as its symptoms had been physical for seventeenth-century mercenary soldiers who’d fallen ill from being so far from home, the first to be diagnosed with the disease of nostalgia. Though never so acute, the longing for something I felt divided from, which was neither a time nor a place but something formless and unnamed, had been with me since I was a child. Though now I want to say that the division I felt was, in a sense, within me: the division of being both here and not here, but rather there.

In Hebrew, the world is olam, and now I remembered that my father had once told me that the word comes from the root alam, which means “to hide,” or “to conceal.” In Freud’s examination of where heimlich and unheimlich dissolve into one another and illuminate an anxiety (something that ought to have been kept concealed, but that has nevertheless come to light), he nearly touched the wisdom of his Jewish ancestors. But in the end, stuck with German and the anxieties of the modern mind, he fell short of their radicalism. For the ancient Jews, the world was always both hidden and revealed.
* * *

Heim—home. Yes, the place one has always been, however hidden from one’s awareness, could only be called that, couldn’t it? And yet, in another way, doesn’t home only become home if one goes away from it, since it’s only with distance, only in the return, that we are able to recognize it as the place that shelters our true self?

My older son wanted to know why I needed to research a hotel I had been to so many times, and the younger one wanted to know the meaning of “research.” Naturally they are both artists, my children. After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there

What if life, which appears to take place down countless long hallways, in waiting rooms and foreign cities, on terraces, in hospitals and gardens, rented rooms and crowded trains, in truth occurs in only one place, a single location from which one dreams of those other places?