Tel Aviv, January 2012

We went out for a walk at night.  The bedouin tent village, with all the camels asleep in the paddock, faded behind us, the lights dimming past the dunes we crossed.  Looking back it was a glint on the horizon of the vast emptiness. A minute later there was nothing.  The ground was covered with large rocks and there was only starlight to see by.  I threw one of the rocks, the size of a giant grapefruit, and when it landed it cracked and made a spark.  The dunes looked otherwordly and the sky was bigger than I’d ever seen it.  We laid down in the cold rock and sand and it felt like we were on the surface of the moon, spinning.  I tried to learn to tell time by the stars but there was no time out there.

“[Jerusalem] exists in the past, as the capital of a lost civilization.  It exists in the future as the portal to the next world.  It exists everywhere but in the present.  It’s where the past and the future overwhelm the present.”  Rich Cohen, Israel is Real

The Old City is encircled by thick walls, encompassing sites like the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, places with names that are familiar even if you don’t know what they mean.  Enclosed within these walls, this city seems to belong more to the dead than to the living.  Things seem stagnant, yet people do live there.  Schoolchildren descend ancient steps, the day done.  Shops, catering mostly to the tourists and the pilgrims, offer pita and “Holy Bagels,” religious souvenirs, reproductions of famous works of art, and other tchotchkes.

Outside the walls are other sites just as old, like the City of David, a dig of the oldest settlement of Jerusalem.  Across from the City of David is the mostly Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, where living people breathe the same ancient air as their long-dead neighbors, where their muezzin calls them to prayer, though the adhan is largely ignored by tourists more interested in dust-covered tunnels with supposed biblical references.

Outside the walls, Jerusalem seems like any other city, with shops and museums and bridges and roads, and people unconcerned with God.  But what is inside the walls seems to allow for what is outside them.  What is Jerusalem, if not those supposedly holy places?

One night we went out to a bar called Uganda and drank Goldstars and talked about music.  The name Uganda hints at the creation of the state of Israel, and therefore at its precarious position today, how easily it could have been on a different continent, with different angry neighbors.  Even when you’re drinking, Israel doesn’t let you forget about its short history.

We visited the Western Wall on Shabbat, a sea of men and women dressed unanimously in black.  Women with long skirts or dresses and thick, practical shoes ushered their daughters to the women’s side, which is noticeably smaller and quieter than the men’s side.  Their heads covered, they bowed to the old rocks, davening and mumbling their prayers, writing them on slips of paper and sticking them into the wall.  I know they’re praying, but to me anything in Hebrew sounds like a prayer.

I sat and considered the wall.  Pigeons nest in it.  There was a bar mitzvah happening on the men’s side, loud with drums and singing and dancing.  Some girls took plastic chairs to stand on and peer over at the other side.  Most women continued with their heads in their prayer books.  When they were ready to leave, they walked backwards away from the wall, as if it were the sea, as if they were afraid of what it might do to them, not considering that it might be more dangerous to walk backwards in a crowd.

Eventually the crowd thinned and I approached the wall, amazed at all the slips of paper prayers.  They seemed so disposable, and I had an urge to read them all.  Where did these women think their prayers went?  Maybe they believed that when they’re fulfilled they disappear.  Maybe they knew that twice a year they’re collected and buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.  Maybe they didn’t care, because putting them out there, into the wall, into the world, is the first step towards accomplishing them.  I sat there and I couldn’t abide the belief that the spirit of God was really more present there than anywhere else.  In the gloaming, the stone blocks, millennia old, looked beautiful, but to me it’s just a very old wall.

At Yad Vashem a sweet-faced woman with round glasses told us her survivor story: About how she ran from her Polish town, the only place she knew, when the Nazis rounded everyone up.  About surviving in a concentration camp under the care of a woman near her mother’s age, a woman who had probably lost her own children and, like a little girl with a doll, needed something to take care of.  About the different families, in Sweden, in the States, who adopted her and gave her a new name, a new birthday.  About growing up and growing older, not entirely knowing who she was.  About how, one day, many years later, she and her husband visited Poland and found her birth certificate.  Names and dates were fixed, memory revealed.  She said it was surprisingly important to her, to hold her own birth certificate.  It let her know she exists.

The last room in the museum is the hall of names, where volumes filled with the names of people killed in the Holocaust are stacked from floor to ceiling and a floating platform in the middle of the circular space allows a vantage of the sea of the lost.  Adjacent to this space is a room with rows of computers, where you can look up your family name and see where your ancestors came from and where they died, that you didn’t come from nothing, that you have, in some sense, always existed.  It seems to me that Jews are always trying to prove we exist.

Jerusalem, January 2012

(post title adapted from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day“)

It took more than a day to get from California to Israel, which only heightened the feeling of being far away.  I was disoriented, as all travelers are, and we immediately boarded a bus that took us from Tel Aviv to Tiberias, a city I remembered for its feral cats (which are apparently everywhere in Israel).  Last time, I had arrived by boat on the Sea of Galilee so it was difficult for me to retrace my steps in my memory.  In fact, nowhere I went felt very familiar.  The last time I was in that part of the world was half my life ago, which is nothing in the scheme of its history, but a lot in mine.

Every road sign has words in Hebrew and in Arabic and transliterated into the Roman alphabet.  Some names, we were told, were changed when the land became Israel.  Naming things, renaming things, makes them your own.  Our tour guide would at times point out the window at the West Bank, indicating an invisible border.  Someone mentioned Benedict Anderson’s idea of imagined communities.  Many Arab settlers in the West Bank wear keys around their necks, which, given the opportunity, would unlock the homes they left behind.  Is the West Bank an imagined community?  Is Israel?  It had always seemed to me like a failing experiment, but there are people who live there, who have always lived there, and who have nothing to do with my idea of what Israel is.

Our guide also pointed out a strange logic at work throughout Israel: the Sea of Galilee is the largest fresh water supply in a country with drought problems.  Red lines mark the sea level until a certain depth, at which a black line indicates the lowest level the water can be drained to.  Unless there’s a drought and they need water, in which case they repaint the black line red and continue draining.  Similarly, the law prevents raising pigs for slaughter on the land, so they build platforms and keep the pigs elevated above the land.  And at the Golan Heights there is a certain number of military vehicles allowed on either side of the border so the Israelis paint their black military license plates red, like the police.  The Syrians, of course, do the same.  These hypocrisies seem meaningful in a place as encumbered with meaning as Israel, but in reality there’s little difference between how they do things there and how we do them here.

Tzfat, January 2012

30 October 2011, 11pm, between Philadelphia and D.C.

There is an intimacy to the last row of a tiny puddle jumper in the dark of night, the arm rest up, a loveseat.  Me and the boy with the big knees, who smelled like fresh-air and rouged cheeks.  Sitting so close, I memorized his knees and shoes, his fingers turning the pages of his book, but I never saw his face.

4 November 2011, sundown, Charlotte, NC

Watching from the plane the autumnal blush of the northeast, the paved tongues unfurling in front of homes in planned communities, the beautiful detritus of haphazard cemeteries, littered with broken graves, small but distinguishable from the air. The red sun marking the difference between the pink below and the blue above, setting the clouds on fire.  A sunset so simply wrought, like a piece of art in a hotel room, but alive, something you expect you won’t see again in just that same way. Which is probably what impressed the painter.  Anyway, something I would not have seen but for the geographic mess of re-routing.  And then through the clouds it was gone.  A fleeting glimpse settled into dark.  When I think again of Charlotte, I’ll probably forget I’ve seen anything of it.

9 Nov. 2011, Nashville

After so many hours spent in airports and in planes, all of these cities and towns, destinations, Denver, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Providence, have become little more than a name on a map to me, measurable by the two hours it takes to get there, which could be five, which could be 50 minutes.  On one hand, it reduces every city to the letters in its name, robbing it of what makes it unique.  But on the other, it makes me feel somehow closer to them all, makes them feel realizable.  I sat next to a woman from Wilmington, an Evangelical man from Nashville, a man who works for the government from Lafayette, CA, a businessman from San Antonio, a doctor from Toledo, a young man from India, reading in Hindi.  Everywhere is possible.

2 December 2011, Ft. Lauderdale, FL & Houston, TX

It seemed that everyone we encountered in Florida was from New York.  Snowbirds, retirees, emigrees.  I met a man in the Fort Lauderdale Airport who had moved from Vermont two years ago.  ”You’re not from here are you?”  No.  ”No one’s from here.  It’s very strange.”  He was traveling with his 2 and a half year old daughter, Tess, and took care to give her pigtails.  They were on their way to Alpine, UT, to visit her great-grandparents. We watched each other’s bags, spoke for a half hour before boarding, saw each other in passing in Houston.  And that’s that.  These ephemeral encounters with faces somehow familiar are disorienting, like seeing people from disparate parts of your life together in a dream.  I will never see these people again; no matter how small the world is, that’s assured.

I never knew if my birthday fell in summer or in fall.  Every year it was different, sometimes tinged with the hot glare of summer, despite being stuck in school (which was always exciting, anyway); sometimes the leaves had already turned and I could immediately wear the new sweater I received as a present.  This year it was definitely summertime, in the 90s and with a night that didn’t cool.  The celebration lasted more than the usual week, with a belated road trip to Los Angeles and a stop at the Madonna Inn.  Their pink champagne cake is my two-year old self’s only desire.

This time of year, when the weather is mysterious and wavering, is my favorite time.  Indian summer, that liminal season before the cold stays for good, after the sun has shut one eye.  When the stickiness in the air gives way to smoke and dying leaves. Liminal like twilight, when the sun extinguishes itself in the big puddle out west, lights flicker on in houses built into mountains, neither dark nor light outside.

“I find myself stressing the fire because fires were important to us.  I grew up in California, John and I lived there together for twenty-four years, in California we heated our houses by building fires.  We built fires even on summer evenings, because the fog came in.  Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe through the night.” —  Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

somewhere between summer and fall, 2011

The water was cold.  It was thick, like slush ice.  Only it kind of lived.  One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been running under this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come spewing up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was a part of the water, of the waiting and the threat.  –  William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

The river is wide and high.  Tree tops peak out of the muddy water, hinting at the depths below, which is normally dry land.  A staircase off the Moonwalk in the French descends into the river like a blind plank walk.  A playground on the banks in Algiers is almost completely hidden.  But the weather is mild and the steadily rising tide is easy to ignore somehow, despite the sense that everything in this city seems related to Katrina, in a way diminishing the city’s history prior to the disaster.  Maybe because everywhere you turn you come back to the river, the way the city curves around all those bends earning it the nickname the Crescent City.  But there is more than fear associated with the waters, commerce, joy even.  At the End of the World, three men were fishing for catfish, cleaning up, pulling large, ugly, slippery things from the water, some weighing as much as 50 pounds.

The tide continued to rise and rural outskirts were flooded, deferring anymore damage to the city for now.  Reports from other cities, other countries, of floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and droughts are just as alarming and the scary thought that extreme weather is now normal is not so easy to ignore.

That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long.  Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.    –William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

On the cab ride from the airport, the driver, Ali, was perplexed by my questions about the cemeteries we passed and my eagerness to visit them.  I mentioned the famously ornate style of New Orleans cemeteries and their above ground tombs, built because of New Orleans’ unusually high water table, but his only response was, “It’s just slow cremation.”  There are 42 extant cemeteries in New Orleans; I visited two.  Cemeteries are the best places to visit in a city, like a park but quieter, more serene, and with more stories.

New Orleans cemeteries are called Cities of the Dead, something that sounds so ancient and mystical, like Egypt.  The ones I visited were not so impressive for their size but for their character.  St. Roch’s was beautiful and silent.  The chapel was built in the 19th century during an outbreak of yellow fever, and dedicated to Saint Roch, whose patronage is invoked against plague.  The reliquary is filled with crutches and mannequin arms and heads, things left behind by parishioners who were miraculously cured. The chapel is painted a perfect churchly blue.  Many of the graves are very old, people with German, Italian and Irish last names who died a century or more ago, which reminded me of something I had read once, about there being two groups of the dead in some African cultures, the recently departed and the long dead:

The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the Zamani are not forgotten but revered.  – James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

Loewen also quotes from John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy:

It [the Zamani] is the final storehouse for all phenomena and events, the ocean of time in which everything becomes absorbed into a reality that is neither after nor before.

St. Roch’s cemetery felt inhabited by the Zamani, long-dead immigrants whose grandchildren are already dead.  Maybe cemeteries feel so peaceful because they exist somehow outside of time, inhabited as they are by people who have left this world and survive only in some other dimension, maybe not forgotten but certainly left alone.

St. Roch’s and St. Louis No. 1 cemeteries, New Orleans

Arriving at night leaves the traveler with a skewed perspective.  Mid-City seemed dark and mysterious, dangerous even, the enormous granite elk in Greenwood cemetery portentous.  In the light of day, of course, things had changed.  All pigs look black at night.  Though there are a lot of homes still abandoned in Mid-City, it seems like a lovely neighborhood with a lot of families. Abandoned homes also seemed common in many neighborhoods.  The population post-Katrina is little more than half what it used to be, with empty houses lingering, some still with the hieroglyphic X’s and other symbols denoting unknowable things about the people who live(d) there.

The Lower Ninth Ward showed its own unique scars.  Juxtaposed with tours of the bizarre Brad Pitt Make It Right houses, many of the plots were completely vacant, overgrown with tall grass covering all but the last glimpses of former dwellings, pipes sticking up or a foot of foundation standing.  Signs for mold removal hung on most telephone poles, along with hand-drawn signs advertising “We Cut Big Lot Grass.”  Despite the devastation, though, the Lower Ninth had a lot of new construction, too.

New Orleans feels immediately different, and free.  In an evermore globalized world, where every city seems a variation on the theme, New Orleans is not.  I met a self-proclaimed prophet while waiting for the bus on St. Claude who told me many things about lasers shooting from helicopters hovering over the city and his inventions to cure cancer, but nothing more interesting than what he told me about why he loves his hometown.  He’s lived there all his life, except for a brief stint in Pennsylvania, and he returned eagerly because, as he says, “This is where I feel free.”  When we were hanging out at the End of the World, where the Industrial Canal meets the Mississippi, I overheard a woman say, “That’s what I love about yoga in New Orleans–even the teachers drink and smoke.  I’m used to New York yoga teachers who’re all vegetarians.  Here they talk about eating and drinking.”  There are sandwich board signs in front of most bars advertising “To Go Drinks” (exactly what it sounds like).  There are things you can get away with in New Orleans that make it feel outside the purview of society, the real end of the world, life after the world ended for many six years ago.  But more than just the laws, or lack thereof, is the spirit that emanates from the city.  People say hello to you when you pass; it’s rude not to.  As we rode down Palmyra Street on our bikes, children smiled, a man on his porch shouted, “Have a nice day.”

As we walked our bikes up Frenchman on my last night, listening in on the different songs emanating from the clubs, we stopped in front of a sushi place with an all-Japanese three piece band.  The trumpeter was singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” in his brassy voice. After the song finished, we rode home along Bourbon Street, all neon and noise, but after a couple of blocks chose a different route, I think so as not to lose the lullaby in our heads.  We wound through the Treme at midnight, empty, quiet, only a couple of lonely dogs chasing us for a few blocks.  As I rode on the sidewalk I caught a glimpse through an open front door of what looked like an abandoned house, and saw a pair of women’s bare feet, lying on the floor, sleeping I hope.

New Orleans, 12-17 May 2011

Driving down Karl Marx Allee in the former East Berlin seems to be a better indicator of life under Soviet rule than taking snapshots of men in uniform at Checkpoint Charlie.  The bland yet bombastic, monotonous buildings, which are now being renovated as low-income housing, are a physical emblem of one objective of Soviet rule: the erasure of the individual.  These dilapidated relics also remind me of what W.G. Sebald wrote about large, state buildings in his novel Austerlitz:

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels.  At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence in ruins.

Karl Marx’s grave provides an interesting juxtaposition to the simplicity of Berlin’s Soviet architecture.  Situated on a prominent path in London’s Highgate Cemetery (a burial ground you have to pay admission to enter), adjacent to the posh neighborhood of Hampstead, visitors can spot Karl Marx’s enormous bust protruding from the top of his grave, which proclaims, of course, “Workers of all lands unite.”

Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin & Highgate Cemetery, London, August 2010