Tel Aviv

... if C. will wake up!

We did eventually get to Tel Aviv.  Compared to Jerusalem the entrance to city via the bus station was like 'Brave New World' - all grey concrete and gaudy signage.  The impression lasted as we walked towards the centre of the city via a park.  A used syringe on the ground, litter, seedy gatherings and under the sparse trees, drunken and passed out were the failed aliyah-ots - ethiopian black jews who had obviously not successfully assimilated into the promised land.  We wondered who was in control there - perhaps the drug lords and not the ubiquitous police (who seemed to be ubiquitously absent in this squallid suburb).

Tel Aviv is a new city set along the coastal beaches north of Jaffa.  It has grown haphazardly in spurts - and the building material of choice is rapidly erected concrete and not the hewn stone of Jerusalem.  In central Tel Aviv the architecture while still often shabby had taken enough time to allow beauty to emerge.  There were the pretty 1920's art deco apartments and public buildings, and the area around Nahalat Binyamin had a very cuban feel, with the homes looking like old Havana.

We ate chocolate at the 'Chocolate by the bald man' (been yearning to try it) and then continued down Sheinken St towards the mediterranean beaches.

The beaches and blue sea were beautiful.  Shining and (relatively clean) - young tanned israelis playing makot, fashionistas holding a fashion shoot with such young and underdressed models, a disturbing lack of concern about kosher anything (the market sells fresh pork!!!) and the beachside restaurants sell seafood.  we drank wine under a beach umbrella, and thought homewards.

On returning for our last night in Jerusalem, in the twilight the moon was white and huge in the pale blue sky.  the city looked sad (that we were going) but C.  said it wasn't the city, it was me. all the shutters were hanging in despair.  the stones were tinged gray with melancholy ... even the buses seemed to groan as they trawled up and down the ascents.  We had one last meander through the old city and then turned just in time to catch the last arab bus to the mt of olives.

Jerusalem's darkened streets and plazas and her jaded watchmen.

Petra and the Starscape

We spent the night in the Al-furnuq Hidab at the head of the wadi.  In the morning we walked down the road on one steep side of Wadi Musa (The Gully of Moses) towards the narrow clefts that house the ancient city of the Nabateans.  Our entry included an amusing horse ride and then the fabulous walk through the wind/water cut red sandstone cliffs.  There were scores of people there but one of the main attractions were the rakish bedouin.  They looked like princes set up on their camels - princes or pirates.  C. was drawn to their tent/cave lifestyle and their communion with their animals.  This impression led us to the Bedouin village on the mountain above Petra.  We went home with the bedouin, their camels and donkeys and would then eat a bedouin barbecue under the moonlit sky of little Petra.

I can imagine the Bedouin in the past, Petra has always been in their guardianship until tricked by a swiss explorer in the 1800's.  We met some of the women in the village.  Life is hard, in the desert climate, the outdoor life is hard on the skin, and while the bedouin do not tend to drink alcohol, the culture of smoking has made an enormous impact on health.  Many even young people we met seemed to be in the early stages of emphysema.

For all this they are a beautiful, proud and generous people who love to tell stories, pose convoluted riddles and are deeply connected to their land.

"The earth is my mattress and the stars, my blanket!"

Riding in the donkey train in such an exotic landscape with exotic peoples brought the line from the Song of Songs to my mind - "I went down to the nut garden to see if the pomegranates had flowered ... and lo! I found myself in a Prince's train" (a caravan of camels, a procession of donkeys)!!

black as the tents of kedar

Beautiful views over Petra in the sunset and we recalled the adventures of the day - we had made a wild journey down to Eilat and crossed the border into Jordan via the Yitzak Rabin/Araba crossing.  The no man's land in between the two countries that we had to walk felt like the 'green mile'.  A further wild taxi ride (very fast - I had a great fear for children, women walking, and the two enormous wedding parties, goat herds we encountered) brought us to the famous Wadi.  We met Bedouin traders along the way.  Took a great interest in C. due to the Thai Red Shirt protesters being in the world news (not that C. had a red shirt - his shirt had a didgeridoo on it).  The Bedouin men have dark skin, long black curly hair, wear kohl under their eyes, and sport elegantly crafted beards and goatees.  Crowned with the large checked head scarves and the occasional gold tooth or ear ring they make an immediate association with pirates!!

Black as the tents of Kedar!!!  The tents are made of dark goat skins.  I wonder if Shulamith was bedouin...

Fuschia highlights and pomegranate petals

From our roof top columbarium I can hear the sounds of birds, children crying, laughing, playing, and general village ruckus.  The hazy sky drifts over the rough and bare, stony landscape - all white stone and grey-green of the olive trees.  We have had two showers of rain here, which has excited the birds and freshened the air.  Its now cool, and I would describe the scent of the air but I smell like fruit salad and it overpowers everything else.

This morning in desperate need of a femme session I dragged C. with me to the local gathering of the banot yerushalayim at a pink painted salon for Only Women.  C. was despatched once I discovered I could indeed have something done!  I saw an art film once about a Lebanese hairdressing salon and the lives and dramas of the hairdressers and their clients - so I was intrigued at any rate at whether I would recognise similarities (though I was definitely in desperate need of salvation where beautiful hair is concerned).  In the space of a whirlwind, the maternal hairdresser, short, pretty, blond streaked hair, and the ubiquitous black suede tracksuit had whisked me into a chair and was quite determined to re-dye my hair dark brown and add fuschia highlights (for free).  My protestations were brushed aside!  Needless to say, I now sport fuschia highlights and have a classic Jordanian hair style.  I feel like Queen Rania (which is high praise indeed).

Many of the women come into the salon donned in black from head to toe, but once inside its all off, and there are highlights, perms, cuts, babies crying, waxing in the arabic style and eyebrow styling all enhanced with the local gossip.  I was instructed not to talk, and she would fix the travesty of my last haircut and colour!  It was easy to see what a close relationship the women had here.  Everyone knows each other, families, relatives, children.  The group gathers its strength in this powerful place.  It was a lovely experience though walking home alone up the lane I felt my new hair was being assessed by the entire community.  The attention did leave me momentarily when some irate shopkeeper pelted a young boy with a broccoli head.

C. isn't feeling well.  He has weathered the stress of the last few days less externally than I.  But we are hoping that by morning we can travel across the border and see the sun set over Petra and her ancient nabatean ruins.  And so, our enforced stay in this beautiful land continues to yield the promise of pomegranates.  Even now, their red petals are beginning to open and Ithaca does not seem so far away.

Ibrahim's house of peace

We have found solace (from the pergatory of the inevitable obstacle and the agony of separation!!!) at Ibrahim's peace-house.  It towers along with the other white stone terraced house/apartments along the edge of the Mt of Olives.  We have the luxurius privacy a newly plastered white room on the roof (seems luxurious in relation to the last week when we slept on rooftops with scores of other travellers).  We have one window that is a portal into the exotic - like we were eagles soaring over the rolling judean hills, rolling off into the Jordan.  The sunset bathed the extraordinary view in a dusky pink, with the nearby call of the muezzin, the scenario seemed like the music of sunrise in that very bad movie about angels and falling, and the cost and blessing of being human.  A hard day, an extraordinary day... and finally a house of peace.

... and I would take you into my mother's house, into the chamber of the one who conceived me, there I would give you spiced wine to drink, the nectar of the pomegranate...

C. says we have finally met the King of Salem (the ever apparent Melchizedek).

An interlude with Jacque "Writing and Difference" (Madness)

There was a space of blue sky and swallows today in the old crusader hospice in the Jewish quarter.  I read Derrida on madness and the earth inexplicably coloured up - I found myself in the present once again (instead of that pergatory of waiting for the inevitable obstacle).  He was critiquing Foucault, Descartes and Schelling and perhaps the entire philosophical chorus from Greece to Heidegger.  Nietzsche was mentioned but not entirely in the negative.  He may have been keeping score.  The question was really about who in fact is mad, and how do we then define it in the medium of language.  Ideal reading material for such a day with the threat of Icelandic Volcanoes getting off their rocky haunches and stomping all over European progressivism.

In the end it was not only about madness, but madness and dreaming - neither have a hold on reality but then reality becomes the realm of description based on the senses.  Descartes claims only mathematics is sane by this definition.  Derrida denies the process of defining anything.

I don't know what to claim in this entre into Jacque's brain.  Though I suppose he would say the words are no longer his and quite rightly signify his absence.  The words alone are infinite.  Mad or sane, and what does language have to do with it?  And what exactly is the 'Cogito'.  The mad don't think?  The mad think but can't apply the meaning?  The mad can't utter the words that produce encounter?  Jacque!!!

I will try the essay on Jabez and Jacque's exploration of the world within the book.

An object lesson in separation and longing

How the stones have lost their lustre!!  We are longing to return home.  Longing for reunions.  Longing to give presents and hugs.  Its an abyss of emptiness, this longing, a gaping hole in my body, in my chest like a black hole, star destroyer.  Intense, tangible and at the same time the policeman in my head says "indulgent child, stop your crying!"  When there was no challenge to my happiness I was easy, and free, and now, all the caverns have collapsed and the stars have fallen from the sky.

Yearning, the abyss separating us from paradise, from stasis.  Yearning - this out-of-balance, incredible desire to be in balance - with what? - with society? with nature? with each other? with our own selves? within our selves? with our ideals and conceptions?  Palpable longing for homeostasis... and yet when homeostasis is achieved we search for a challenge that will keep us in tension with the world.  We require this tension to become??  Without this tension we are in danger of subsiding, with desensitization to the world, we lose all forward momentum.

The heightening of longing leads to heightening of the imagination, in my imagination I see a rainbow of scenarios in which my desires are fulfilled.  Children embraced, turkish delight munched, copper coffee pots admired, scarves and hats tried on, charades and laughing, photographs, the lighting of incence, the hyperbolic descriptions and laughter, the exotic tales of the camels on the hills.

I have merged with my Shulamith.  I am the apparition and she becomes real, the vessel of my own mounting soul-sickness, my yearning-sickness that prevents me from drinking and breathing. I am bound in place, straining against these ropes of fate while the whole world loses its colour.  I am no longer in the now.  I have moved to the place of transit, the neither-here-nor-there.  I no longer see the swallows and the doves.

Separation and the tolling of the bells

Each bell and each of the muezzins' daily prayers toll out my separation.  Each bell jars me and reminds me.  Nothing has changed and everything has changed.  Put up a block, a wall, a tower of stones, an erection of bricks, a mountain in my way.  Any thing of substance, a fence with barbed wire!  The blue day and happy bird song slaps me hard across my face and leaves me breathless.  Jerusalem of Gold is not here amongst the minnarets, golden domes and wailing walls, but in a shabby row of flats in west Auckland.

A last Shabbos?

Last night we joined the throngs at the kotel.  There was singing, dancing, the dis/harmony of a thousand prayers, crying babies and gossip, and the uncultured courting of the young.  It was a wild night and a good night.  But this night I did not sleep well on account of Eyjafjallajokull which is in fact an icelandic god rising angrily from beneath a frozen river of ice... He has spewed wrath into the skies and snapped our homeward bound journey in two.  ... I want to go home.  Eyjafjallajokull makes a mockery of the modern world, and all our systems and plans.  He puts us back an entire century!  In my dreams I imagined an overland journey to New Zealand via Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I had a thought about the lover in the Song - a deer, a stag.  We saw an ibex stag/bull in En Gedi.  He was afraid of human beings.  He was high up the side of the wadi, kneeling in the shade of a small grotto in the limestone.  Probably waiting for sunset when he can come down and drink water in the falls, where all the greenery is, the garden.  Waiting for shadows.  Quick to flee, self-preservation, fear of the hunter.  C. saw him first and that is because he had a hunter's eye.  We only saw one.   I believe they are territorial.

Sheol dreams

I slept all night but in and out of nightmares.  Maybe it was the wind change, the fever that has clung to me since YadvaShem.  The warming weather.  The cool swim at En Gedi, and the hot walk high on the sides of the wadi.  I dreamed of a colourless world, trapped in the Lovers Cave, high in the wadi with the stone man.  I dreamed of cold, windswept mountains high up and near Syria.  I dreamed of cavernous dwelling places, and striped rough cotton cushions, rams horns, rocks piled into rows, and circles, chipped and broken mosaics.  All this whirled around me as I peered wildly out of the Dodim Cave guarded by the bearded semitic king carved into the cliff by the wind.  This morning I am exhausted as if I walked across the Negev in my sleep with the images of the Shoah walking with me, dread companions.  Tired and throbbing in my temples.  There were no crabs, conies, or ibex in these dreams, no doves, canaries, swallows.  No black ants, and no red dragonflies.

The cavern of love

We took a bus early this morning down to En Gedi.  We walked up to Nahal David and then took a rickety path up the steep side of the wadi to the Dodim Cave ... the cave of lovers!!!  A beautiful peaceful pool and cave high above the lower waterfalls with a view over the Dead Sea (which was crystal blue) and a stunning glimpse of the mountains of Jordan.  Shulamit spring, cave of love, peace.

The wisdom of the olive tree

Today we explored the botanical gardens walking to Nayot passed the myriad Jerusalem cafes aligning Derech Aza.  We saw the yellow green bark of the pistachio, the oak, the cypress, the olive, the balsam, the trees and flowers of the middle east and the mediteranean.  And then continued to Ein Kerem and visited Yad Vashem (Hand and Name... huge triangular holocaust memorial).  We saw it and came out of it with the setting sun over the Ya'ar Yerushalayim (forest of Jerusalem).  I can't say any more about the memorial and the images and stories and recountings, and what I saw, and heard and felt, the room of books full of names.  The images of children, the paintings, the journals, the ribbons from their clothes, the mothers holding their children, the tears, shoes, spectacles, emerald necklaces and the dark valley beyond tears.  And the faces that turned away, and the very few faces who turned towards and the very many more evil hands.  Some things can't be adequately written down.


And my shulamith, where is she.  At the bottom of a pit?  Transmuted into ash?  Emaciated, cradling her child at the last?

A museum of psalms (or) the halls of heaven

I think I saw God today in the form of a little old man with a long white beard and forelocks and fringes.  When I first saw him he was lying in his bed, in a bed sitter in the lower floor of a stone house.  The door into the dooryard was army green and almost off its hinge.  How could I have known the mysterious old man was the ancient painter who paints with magic fingers.  And could paint portals into space without changing his brush.  He has painted the whole world and even more of the universe in an old house with a broken courtyard in Rav Kook street in Jerusalem.  In fact when he showed me his paintings of the creation of the world I thought for a moment I was there.  And when I saw his Jerusalem, white and pure, and floating above the earth on a cloud of 600000 hebrew letters I also believed him, because of course I saw it with my eyes.  And I also thought I was in the courtyard of the halls of heaven because he had even painted what I had felt when I had read the psalm of the fishes and their paths in the sea, and the smallness of a man, and the womb from which he was brought forth.  He had even painted the holding of my breath and how I had wondered about it all on a spring day 7 years ago.  He had painted the music of heaven and how it dances off the corners of these stones and breezes across my face.  I hadn't known it until now.  And how love surges from the heart of the yod, blasting out and transforming into the colours of a rainbow.

Fancy finding the heart of heaven in a ramshackle and broken down house in Rav Kook Street Jerusalem.

Promethea, the Shoah, and pains of the heart

This morning I needed to read and think about the Song of Songs.  I got up but didn't want to go.  C. was sleeping.  The Sharuv winds had dissipated leaving cool winds from the north, from Hermon, from the Lebanon.  I got up to go but he said don't leave me... so I stayed a little longer... and then I left to go to Mamilla where I thought I could find a quiet warm spot in a cafe overlooking the garden quarter outside Jaffa gate.  I did.  And then I read Promethea, the last part where H. talks about love for Promethea, and the world with its bulls horns and heart moist like a river but torn together and apart.  Something in the womb I had constructed in the cafe made the words in Promethea intense and I felt every one this morning.  And then the sirens blasted and everything in the city stopped.  Stopped to remember the deaths of 6 million children, 6 million who once were children and now ash.  And every eye was touched with the pain of remembering and an old man stood in the cafe and cried.  And because at that moment I was already undone by Promethea, words on a page, a book, but a book of books, the siren and the eye unblinking and the silence and the blast and the stop pierced me and I felt entirely broken and in pain.  Which I can't understand because I'm too small.  My soul isn't pure enough for noble pain written down and the memory of the world.  I left the cafe and went to buy some stamps.  And the woman who I bought the stamps from offered me a phone card.  And I wanted to be sick because my heart was still in my throat and I couldnt breathe.

A sharuv and dragons in the Negev

Yesterday, the wind changed.  Everybody can tell dramatically if the wind changes here in Jerusalem.  The wind becomes hot, and then dust comes with the hot wind.  The dust brought by the wind covers the whole city.  You can barely see the sun.  It just becomes a dull glow in the sky.  You can't see the mount of olives or mt scopus, and barely mt moriah.  it is like a plague from egypt.  a demon from the desert.  which is where the wind comes from.  the hot, devouring mouth of the desert which is in the south east.  the negev.  a fire breathing dragon in the desert blows hot fumes on the city.

My Gargantuan Hermon, fierce beauty

I discovered a few things on our drive up to Tsafed and Hermon.  One, that the Shulamith could not see Hermon from Jerusalem, and two, she would have had to see the Hermon and the mountains of the north, the Lebanon to know how to use the right words, evoke the right imagery.  Mountains like Hermon are godlike, goddesslike.  We drove up the mountain where Tsafed nestles like a tibetan monastery, its so high, cold, clear.  The same afternoon we drove to Hermon, through Neve Ativ, and up through Magdal Shamms.  We pitched a tent at the side of Lake Ram.  It was clear, cool, still.  But over night she blinked her eyes and snorted her nose and there were gales, squalls, thick, dark clouds that seemed to slam into the mountain side.  She didnt move.  She was implacable and capricious.

Shulamith has this gargantuan capriciousness.  She is a mountain dweller, I could see why Zapphon, the north, the mountain, Hermon, lair of leopards is her home.  White face, storm priestess.  On the side of that mountain I felt like Moshe - small, terrified, as short-lived and insignificant as a butterfly.

Some brave soul carved out a fortress on the flanks of Hermon.  Nimrod castle, amazing construction of stone.  Not without some traces of beauty in its carving.  A decorative fountain, vaulted ceilings, the marmeluke lion. Sitting like a tick on a dog, still standing even though her caliphs have been reduced to dust... now the perpetual home of a tribe of coneys!!

Impromptu rubbish dumps and the trills of small birds

We walked from Nazareth to the Kinneret.  Beautiful hillside, important history, spiritual value ...  the stirring, pondering, meditations of the pilgrim jarred to the present with the trail being apparently used by the locals as a fair place to dump rubbish.  Apart from our constant horror at the desolation of the land by the 21st century, the trail from Nazareth to Sepphoris/Zippori to Cana, Arbel and Wadi Hammim was marvellous.  We lay under the cover of forest in Zippori, tented in the corner of a wheatfield near lavi, met wonderful people, were offered water, gave our water.  The views over the valleys, the ubiquitous birdsong.  Most extraordinary was the trail leading through the Horns of Hattin where a crusader vs saladin battle was fought and the cave fortresses of the rebels in the cliffs of Arbel.  Between the horns of hattin we, with our packs, and sore feet felt like hobbits on their journey through middle earth!!!

I imagined peace at the Galilee when we arrived but it was another jarring return to real time.  Tamar Beach, thumping disco tunes, drum battles on Wii, barking dogs, lights and booze...