08.08.08

Tamar walks into the room where I sit at the computer. "A war has erupted," I tell her, and quickly add: "Not here, in the Caucasus. between Russia and Georgia."

"What," she says, "Now? But now's the Olympics!"

The Hill of Precipice

We take a leak by the crumbling chapel, the hand that flies our kite
holds our Goldstar bottle, nylon string cuts off the blood flow
to our middle finger and maybe we should have brought more water, been more like flying Jesus, bejesus, quiet like the anise, triple arched and worldly.

Maybe, had we been more like the night, more like the wind that took the kite, Paris would have cupped us and sifted us through her fingers. Nazareth's balcony does.
Here French is spoken and Issam says: I wish you a life that's deeper than broader than it is long. I wish you more sky and hills, a lot of all that.

Blue in Akko

Akko was the capital of the second Crusaders kingdom. It is where Napoleon was defeated by the ottomans. It has history that goes back thousands of years and displays itself in grand underground complexes, gardens, towers and fortifications, so it's a bit weird to be walking around it thinking of nothing but Fleetwood Mac.

That's just how life works. My trip up north was initially planned as a research trip for several articles, it ended up expanding and turning into a small self exile. I needed to give downtown lover a bit of room to wander Tel-Aviv freely without the fear of an awkward encounter, and myself a diversion and a sense of distance. seperating is always hard, seperating from her is excruciating. I wish all my readers only the most lighthearted, beautifully tinted travel experiences.

Haifa of Innocense, Haifa of Experience

O Rose,





Thou art real.

Patras

In Patras you could walk directly off the streets and into the port, then to the very end of the dock. There you could wait comfortably: for a ship, For love, for a promise, as you will. I used to wait for all three: a Venetian girl named Danna worked on the “Minoan-Lines” Patras-Venice ferry. We met when making the two-night crossing myself. I was bound for Athens, but upon disembarkation decided to stick around town till Danna completed another round.

Four days later she returned, long dark hair and heavy makeup – she resembled other girls I've seen in Venice but was different, Jewish, so she told me, or at least part Jewish. My own Jewishness thrilled her. Her eyes were full of light when she descended to the dock – a ray of sun glistening on the sea's ripples, a street lamp showing the way to San Marco, a shabbat candle. Together we ran from the port to the streets and up the steep staircase that leads to the top of the citadel hill. We sat panting on the uppermost stair, looking down at the forbidding mouth of the bay of Corinth, guarded by behemoth mountains on both sides, talked a bit and kissed a bit and ran back downtown to feed Danna her favorite Peloponnese souvlaki before she had to take off again.

By the third time I received Danna, it began to seem futile. Two hours every four days hardly justified sticking around as boring a town as that. Patras should be world famous for its endless siestas. The stores seemed to be closed perpetually, not that I had anything to buy nor the money with which to buy it, but I made my living busking and needed pedestrian traffic. A heavy smell of burnt diesel, borne from ship smokestacks, hung over a small sea side bar, the cheapest in town. There I would spend the sleepy afternoons chatting with a Palestinian man in his forties, over shrimp and sweet iced coffee.

One night he took me to the tavern owned by an aqually Palestinian friend. On hearing that I was a compatriot of sorts, a free bottle of ouzo was opened before me, just for me, and for anyone I'd care to treat. It turned out to be bottomless. The only thing that stopped the drinking was a group of girls who pushed the tables against the walls and started dancing to the Greek music. I waddled like a broken legged, happy drake back to the hostel before dawn. Patras trashed me and thrilled me, it taught me peace, generosity, and several good steps all in one night. Still, I was there for Danna and Danna couldn't be there. I departed before she landed for the fourth time.

Here in Haifa, you can't walk directly into the port – security restrictions prohibit it. Nonetheless, there's something Patras-like about the city, especially now, at four A.M.. I can't quite name it – maybe it's the closed stores, maybe the stairs, climbing up the mountain towards Haddar, maybe the absence of Danna. I should sleep but the mosquitoes are killing me so I walk along Ha'azma'ut Boulevard to the old mosque by the Governement Center and watch a bread truck unload in front of a grocery store. When it takes off, the sharp smell of burnt diesel erupts from its exhaust pipe. It engulfs me and suddenly I'm entirely there, thirteen years ago, restless and sleepless, well wined and weary, strolling by the docks, whistling something Billie Holiday sang best.

The Chariot

A friend (Yoram) lent me a book and exposed me to something I did not know existed: "chariot literature".

It turns out that between the second and sixth centuries, Jewish mystics mapped the heavens and wrote travel guides to the realm of angels and of God himself. These books, which read like something between Carlos Castaneda, "the Neverending Story" and Lonely Planet, are accepted by the Talmud, not to mention Kabbalist Judaism. This is Judaism proper and despite protests made by Mimonides and other party-poopers, is accepted as such to this day.

I never realized Judaism had a full on pantheist mythology, including such creatures as Metatron, the man-turned-angel who walks the visionaries through realms of burning rivers and splendiferous palaces, much like a-Yiddishe-Virgil. Metatron was second to God and allowed to sit on a throne in the grandest of the seven palaces of the most sublime realm. Jewish visionary Elisha Ben-Abuya saw him there and assumed that he was a second God. Both were punished: Elisha returned to earth and was declared an apostate, while Metatron had sixty torches of fire stuck between his seventy two wings and forced to stand upright like other angels.

What I read in this story is discomfort with the seeping of pantheist ideas into Judaism (which was at the time fighting to preserve its charecter twixt paganism, Christianity and Gnosticism). Judaism preserved its monotheistic core only on the surface. Underneath that, so long as the chariot literature is not decreed heretical, we are in fact the followers of a religion that believes in monsters with thousands of eyes and magical netherworlds into which people can disappear while in a state of trance.

The epitomy of the chariot literature is a book called "Shi'ur Koma", probably composed in the Holy Land during the second century, which supplies the reader with the exact measurments of God. Make no mistake, God is enormous, but he is nonetheless antropomorphic - a man with feet thousends of miles long, sitting on a levitating, chariot-like throne somewhere quite accesible (anybody said Bhagavad Gita?). The book was given a signature of authenticity by several prominant rabbies, among them the renowned Rabbi Akiva.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Rabbi Akiva and the rest of the ancient Castanedas. Their Judaism is so much more fun than that of my old, semi-religious elementary school in Jerusalem. There we were taught that God is an invisble, conservative, mundane figure, that he spends his time looking over us as we copy in tests (this is actually echoed in "Shiur Koma") and that we should wait nicely for the bell before going out to play football in the dusty, gravelly yard with our yarmulkas hanging off the clips in our hairs.

Add a little bit of imagination to that, and you would have had me praying much more loudly in the mornings. Fortunately they hadn't.

It's hot!

It's being disagreably hot in Tel-Aviv this week, so much so that I feel regretful for having taken my one summer trip to Jordan of all places, I need to chill! I need Svalbard! Kamchatka! Shetland!

During a cold spell this winter I posted "It's cold", which featured photos of Middle Eastern cities in the snow. This time, in honor of the heat, I sought on Google photos of people sunbathing in cold countries. Enjoy.

Norway

Finland

Scotland

Canada

Russia

Sweden, Cool at last!