Lost in the Hills

The nearby, forested hill, is Israel. The faraway, barren one, is the West Bank.

The Jewish National Fund has for decades been busy foresting large areas of Israel, mostly west of Jerusalem but also in the north and the Neguev. This is really an act of reforestation - much of the territory was covered with woods of oak and pistacia, nearlly all of which were chopped for firewood over history. The JNF chose to plant pine. It grows quickly and gives the landscape a pristine look reminicient of eastern Slovakia, land of our ancestors and where we'd probably feel more comfortable.

So, in Israel even a forest is political. However, as my Palestinian friend Philip pointed out to me years ago, when I ranted to him about our woods, even a political forest is nice. Here, two kilometers from the Green Line, we can enjoy locally made cheese and yogurt

as well as meet those who make it.

At this time of year, the hillsides are exploding with wildflowers. We walk among them, not knowing their names. This is our native country, but we are not strongly enough connected to its soil. Our "cousins" from across the fence will know what they are called. In Israel, even looking at a flower is political.

All we wanted was to have a peaceful day in the countryside, to greet springtime and enjoy the last drop of moisture on the ground before the punishing summer arrives, but everything evokes thoughts. The JNF is a discriminatory organization, preventing Arabs from acquiring land. It is now expending its reforesting activities to the West Bank, closely coordinating its activity with the state, so that it fits in with the occupation agenda. A ten minute drive from where we had our cheese is Bil'in, where the fence keeps an entire village away from its lands. The Israeli supreme court ruled that the fence must be moved, and the state simply ignores the verdict, and shoots at those protesting in favor of the court. The instant Slovakian forests, which conveniantly cover up the ruins of villages destroyed in 1948, are oxidizing the soil and preventing the growth of more wildflowers... There's no end to it. How simple everywhere else seems! How difficult it is to clear the mind and simply be, for one moment only, just so as to remain sane.

Walking in these woods is no walk in the woods, but the flowers do comfort. They deserve a word of thanks.

A is

A is for art

A pile of cobblestones on the floor of a museum, each imprinted with the words: "weapon of the proletariat".

B is for birds

A huge flock of geese forms the contour of a clipper ship in the evening sky above Jerusalem's Mouristan square. The fountain is working once more, kids kick a football against an old stone wall.

C is for cancer

My friend G. stands by his macchinetta, making both of us ridiculously strong coffee that is to keep me awake for much of the night. "Mann tracht on gott lacht," he says in Yiddish. "man plans and god laughs."

He has a long scar along his throat from the removal of his thyroid gland. At first I don't know how to relate to his experience, then I remember that I have gone through a divorce. "Not really comparable, but I guess we're both going through the things that make up life."

"Yeah, grown up stuff," he says.

D is for Downtown Lover

Back in my life? maybe yes, maybe no. The other day she was in a taxi, about to get off. The driver saw a guy hailing a cab by the corner and asked if she would mind him picking that guy up. She didn't mind, nor look to see who it was.

E is for eventide

"The night, it has a thousend eyes / the day has only one," quoth the poet. The sexy time of day is not a time of day, and it is crawling into the streets outside my window as I write.

F is for freedom

Walking up Ben-Yehuda St. after two days of hard work, bumping into an aquiantance and pulling him into the Mersend for a cuppa. The afternoon is vast. Roni rolls in on roller blades, posting posters for a poetry event. Kamer pops in, wearing one of his grandpa swaters. I want to interview him on radio Tuesday night, when I'll be studio commentator on the U.S. elections (late late on Galatz Radio). Omer appears with a copy of Haaretz and an easy smile. Obama this, Obama that, Then we all fly away to other places.

G is for gusts of wind

More of those are soon to come.

H is for Mitch Hedberg

"I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too."

I is for the Indigo Girls

Dorky though it is, I've had "Mystery", "Ghost" and "Galileo" playing in my head for a month now.

J is for Jewification of Jaffa

A major issue I have with the current mayor's policies (at least with his crew's), and especially now before the municipal elections. In Israel the term Jewification is considered legitimate. The idea: populating areas that have Arab majorities with as many Jews as possible, in order to "claim" them.

When looking for apartments in Jaffa you will often hear the agent saying: "currently there are many Arabs here, but we're working hard to Jewify the neighborhood and there have already been positive developements aplenty."

K is for kites

The Kite vendor at Charles Clore Park is tying a few samples of his merchendise to a metal railing. There's something both gloomy and hip about watching an elderly, disheveld man flying numerous jolly dragons at once.

L is for love

M is for McCain

Not a bad chap, it seems, but not the sharpest POW in the pencilbox either.

N is for new book project

Still confidential.

O is for Obama

I was there when it started: Democratic national convention, Boston 2004. The Illinois delegation, right by my booth, was going crazy. Obama gave the famous "thin boy with a funny name" speech. Only clinton spoke better.

P is for Park Slope

Where my Friend Erika is sitting and chatting with me right now, making me miss the world once again.

Q is for queers

For a while I knew no one in Tel Aviv who was gay. This is changing, to my delight. There's a sense of humor and an approach to the world that only gay people have. Lose sight of the their society and you lose more then one color in the day to day existance.

R is for Lou Reed

Who is in the city tonight, performing before luckier people that I.

S is for scarves

Girls in autumn look so lovely.

T is for Togo

I'm showing a group of Togolese visitors around the country these days. Took them to the "Jerusalem Hotel" in Sheikh Jarah, had coffee and a cigarette, listened to their chat, realized the Togolese are the cutest people in the world.

U is for Unicum

This liquor I brought from Hungary has to be the nastiest tasting thing on earth, yet I'm finishing the bottle at high speed. Things that taste like medicine are highly marketable early in the flu season.

V is for Vicky Cristina Barcelona

I've been told it's fantastic. If anyone wants to join me for it, let me know.

W is for bad memories

Such bad memories.

X is for xi

I miss scrabble. This Downtown Lover thing had better work out.

Y is for Yad Vashem

Walking out of the long corridor of the Jerusalem Holocaust Museum, I have to wait by the railing of a balcony, overlooking a cluster of forested hills, for a member of our party still inside. Consequently, I spend ten minutes looking at the faces of the people coming out. Each one of them has learned something new and it shows in their eyes. I can't help but admire the corridor and those responsible for filling it with life and with death.

They even kept the whole "everything's fine now that we have our own country" bit in the end distinctly subdued and minimal. It's there, but not so badly. I hate when the Holocaust is presented as nothing more than a sad prologue to the heroic Zionist story. Yad Vashem remains dignified.

Z is for ZZZZZZ

Gotta take a nap now. There's so much life going on, it's tiring, and the Unicum doesn't help perk me up (turns out it's no medicine). See y'all in morning light.

O Let Us Live in Joy

In my previous post I wrote of people running away into nature and the feeling that I've been doing the same, allegorically, for too much of my life. Today I almost did it in practice. Stepping over the fence of downtown lover's parents' home, outside Jerusalem, and heading into the hills for a walk. It was past sunset when I left, so the only photo I took looks like this:

It was a delicious twilight, though, and the further night advanced over high Judea, the more serene I was feeling. Meanwhile, DL was indoors with her dad, watching Romania and Italy tie in Zurich. It was a fine moment in which each of us indulged in what we love best. Now her cheer rises from the basement, which means France scored against the Netherlands. I'm sitting here, writing, with a bottle of beer by my side. Minutes ago DL's mom showed me photos of China, where she often goes on business, and now my mind's eye is full of Beijing highrises and of moonlit Israeli forests. So this is another such fine moment, maybe even finer.

"O let us live in joy, in peace among those who quarrel, among people who quarell, let us live in peace." These words are attributed to the Buddha. I dedicate them to whoever was shooting a machine gun in the valley earlier this evening, and to whomever he was shooting.

Late

It's hardly late by Tel-Avivian terms, only 0:22 at night, yet I feel late.

I spent much of the evening in a radio studio with my friend Susanna, we spoke about Arto Paasilinna's "Year of the Rabbit". It is a book about giving up. A man runs over a rabbit in a Finnish forest, walks among the trees and finds it. Tends to its wound and then drifts with it. He forsakes his Helsinki existance in favor of a drifter's lifestyle, working at odd jobs in the forests of Savo, Kainuu and Lapland, hunting a bear in the snow and drinking its blood, sleeping by a campfire at night.

At no point does Paasilinna describe what this man's feet smell like.

This week I watched a film about escaping: "Into the Wild", by Sean Penn, after the book by john Krakauer. Again a man heads into forests. This time he is young. He is disillusioned not with a family he had built but with the family that brought him life, a truly disfunctional one. He heads north- to alaska, secludes himself in the wilderness, than (spoiler warning), after several weeks of lonely partial bliss, he dies, having accidentally eaten a poisenous plant. Alexander Supertramp escaped completely, too completely.

He is described as having worn no socks for two years.

My feet smell fine but I know I'm escaping too, that I have been since I was 18. Sometimes it's just so damn dark, this whole story. Sometimes it's bright skies by the road in switzerland, examining my sorry shoes, having just crossed Lichtenstein on foot. Sometimes it's late at the little prince, Playing me, playing friend, playing lover, playing father of sorts. buying Flashky a beer because he knew who built the Seagram building.

Whoever built the seagram building wasn't escaping, not when he did it. He did beforehand, you must do for a while, but you don't build the Seagram building from a dead bus in Denali National Park, nor from a dismal Lappish landscape: a slashed forest on the swamps' edge, a screaming crow on a dead tree. you don't build the Seagram building from the back of the Little Prince nor from a studio of Israel's Government radio. I'm going to learn how to do it.