Thursday, September 30, 2004

In the aftermath of the novel

Looking out the window in this mild September restful dreamless day, rather thoughtless and hastened with some fragmentary imagination that couldn't be really described as thought, it's a little bit of a stream through which I wander through cold delicious paradises, old and forlorn suburban landscapes abstracted in my mind like pieces of nowhere, gathering simply everywhere.

I've been absorbed into Naomi's novel for the last three days giving little time to other thoughts, to more serious thought, feeling the shameless sparks of almost poetic intuition rambling through my newfound body. The "Sotah" has been nothing but a delightful souvenir, a little journey through familiar landscapes, too intimate to be called a novel. It's more like a film I've watched in slow candentious motions, swallowing the delicate pain of each and every page in one go, drunk in the helplessness of long bygone lust.

It's strange, despite the universal differences I don't find myself so stranged to the idea of the novel, I think I'd place myself somewhere between Joan Rosenheim and Chaya Leah, yet being a Dina Reich Gutman in the flesh, despite my cosmopolitism and overly infatuated sophistication, very much alike Joan Rosenheim, I don't find myself stranged from religion, probably not from religion as an almost motherly voice of evil and good, but more just like a mere idea, I'm not alien to the idea. I sympathize with Joan and how despite herself she places her own persona in the axes of time as a supreme deed of "chesed"; probably "chesed" is the main idea towards the end of the book. How can we really know what others need? How can we cater for their real feelings and their deliverance? Outreach their souls? For decades strangers to our own kin, how could we unhide ourselves to others? Unhide them? Somehow I think we can, the tremulous flesh is not hideous to the stranger, to unlinked pieces of thought, of pity, of "chesed".

Who can truely understand me? How could I unravel my courage and lift myself in upheaval? How could anyone? It's not a problematic sentimentalism, it's rather the joyous comfort of lightweight, of an almost sacred emptiness. How could just paper and words really understand me or comfort me? How could my body understand me? How could the young and untouched vividly mortal and wrathfully beautiful skin understand me? It's beyond linguistic unity, it's almost in the blood.

In the end of the day I believe Isobel and Dina would reach supreme and perfect understanding, I can see it at glance, thoughtlessly even. Not sure anymore about wife, I believe Dina is as timed as Isobel, far beyond wife, the ultimate victim of supermanliness, in manifold shapes. It's still early and the muse is allegedly attempting to pose over my shoulders and caress my silk-weary skin in one go, in one touch. I believe the note, "The night and the Phoebus" will definitely come through, it just needs a more human touch, a more religious and less deceiving touch.

I need to fix my surrounding a little bit, caress myself in still, nourish my recreations of life with pleasurable delight and above all, send a letter, send a letter to her.

Zweerver

Continuation (just a tiny comment left)

6. The party is this weekend and I wasn't invited and I'm convinced I won't be, I'm so hurt from that. You see? Dina Reich and me have a lot in common. Waiting a couple of months for this to happen and it just didn't come through, why don't they teach us about these go and about of life in the Classics seminar? Everything is so heavy there, and in the end of the day the path life takes is determined only by totally insignificant, sporadic, superficial and spontaneous thoughts, little little banality. About that they didn't teach us, and I swear law school won't do much of a better job, but at least you learn some cruelty, I really need to release this unfounded humanism a little bit. In the end of the day I'm just justifying people, among them myself and it's by far not upright.

Everybody thinks I don't care and that I don't hurt from that, but I really do and how! That day (which I know very well) I'll be sitting home at night mourning my future, the future that never came, the future that I wrote about in those poems I wrote that evening in the old Yaffo. I'll be a mourner that night, let my fate change, would you? I might get a bit surprise though, but it's not very likely. Things are so predictable now. I'm getting emotional and no one can even notice it, but at the same time it's just plain growth. At least I don't fool myself anymore, the rest of the people is another story. They're all strangers anyway, including him.

Ari

PD: Why don't I play an act in which I was invited but I refused to go because my hair is too long and I don't look good enough? Damn I really love myself when I'm desperate enough as to write these totally aphilosophical kind of notes.


Continuation

A few things to add to the last note

1. I'm deeply troubled by such highly personal notes, for the real recipient of what was meant to be said there (yet unsaid, in between the lines you know) is not very likely to read it, he might be not ever interested in doing so, plus the language is already a limitation. Too much of a higher-tier for him.

2. In the book of Naomi Ragen I actually sympathize very much with Dina Reich, but she's a pretty weak figure, isn't she? I really she's detestable but probably I'll like her much more towards the end, I liked her mother a lot more she's already gone. The one I truely like is Chaya Leah and her Moishe, they really amuse me. Life couldn't be any more pathetic and dysfunctional. I must confess I have a terribly sympathy for the haredi world, maybe because I envy their unawareness of those little things I'm always talking about in my writing. That's why I think I don't like Dina, she's too aware in my taste and too banal, superficial, I pity her just on account of the same reasons why I would pity myself. Fortunately the wife of the journalist and Dina never met, they'd have hated each other with pure loving hate, with authentic timeless hatred. I wonder if they'll meet in wife's bereavement therapy? Sounds like a cool idea. When I finish the book I'll be a good kid and try to work with Naomi's suggested questions for discussions. I'll publish them here of course, where else?

3. I'm not in bereavement therapy anymore, for I'm not good at mourning. I forget it every single minute. I think I should change the strategy, maybe passive-aggresiveness is a more urgent personal issue at the time. Let Dina Reich elucidate.

4. I truely hate to think that the things I despise and detest the most about him are the reasons why I really like him, it's so sickening. I mean, I really feel like a writer when such thoughts cross my mind, too elevated for my oversexualized nature. It's a dead end anyway, it's not heading anywhere and it hurts terribly, but remember I'm in permanent denial, no one should know it other than my pintoresque characters. I just need to be more proefficient, smile more, smile, smile, smile, fake it till I make it. Yeah I know, it doesn't really work, but I can try. It sounds to me (and to my imagination even more) that this story will be long and complicated. Now I even put a dull lover in the middle, can I get any worse? I'm so scared to think dreams can come true, at least this time.

5. I can't believe I'm having such chill-out mood after the loss of the note, I think I need to crawl a bit more into my shallowness to make the real core come out of me, maybe this wasn't strong enough. I should start depicting myself with more touch of evil, it really suits me. Look at my life, can you?

Ari


Stubborn? No!

Well enough time to mourn my time, although I still think it was one of most brilliant pieces of work I ever wrote, I depicted myself so accurately from a third person viewpoint, the language was strong and involving.

I'm pretty disturbed at the loss of note to tell the truth, but maybe when I come to think about it the only purpose of the note was to release me from that overcomplicated knot of feelings I was wandering through in the previous hours, no phone calls, no music, no clothes, no nothing, just endlessness. I'm still lucid and very articulate but I think I lost my muse, totally. I'm now in kind of chill-out mood with lawyers conversations and everything. Don't think anything worthy will come out of it.

I don't pretend to give up on the note though, just like I gave up with Anne Frank and wife's universalism, it was astounding. An amazing note, yet gone with the wind, or better say with the wire. There was another note that got lost, the one about the blog subscribers but after a couple of Jameson's I re-wrote the note all over again and it kept me up and half-drunk until the next day, I didn't care much though.

This note on the night and the Phoebus must come through, for it's a truely amazing discovery of the interaction between my ficticious characters, since there's nothing ficticious about them though. In the other hand something about the note troubles me deeply, I never write notes with no reason, and usually they're secretly addressed to someone. This very note wasn't secretly addressed to anyone, but rather loudly addressed to someone.

In the meantime I'm half way through Naomi Ragen's book "Sotah" and it's really interesting. Funnily enough I can say it's not a deeply intellectual novel such as Agnon's Shira or Joyce's infernal dramas, the truth is being the intellectually concerned person I am I rather flow with cheap feminist novels than with all those heavy and musty so-called dramas, I spend more than enough time curdling up into a mustiness I unsuccessfully try to avoid. I really like popular novels, they bring into light more interesting lessons than any elucidations of mythology or comparative religions scholarly text ever do.

Naomi Ragen is no dummie actually, I wish I had such beautiful and expressive language, but I'm on the way. Law school is a first-hand step. I'm improving as time goes by, within ten or twenty years hopefully my linguistic register will be respectable enough as to write anything respectable, or of the same good sake, unreadable.

The note had some other interesting feature, it totally contradicted my philosophical system even more than the character of Isobel, yet the language was rich enough as to say it was part of the philosophical system itself. Many words used here, were used there and so on.

To end this insignificant note I must add my lawyer friend says I must have been a very frustrated translator after he's done some reading of my blog. That only tells a few things, either I'm a completely pathetic self-deceiving animal or a highly materialistic person. What do we care anyway?

I really have this feeling the note won't come through, you'll see.

Ari

Disappointment

My most brilliant ever piece of work was erased by a technical failure. Hereinafter I'll refrain myself from writing at all until I can find some counsel.

I need some time to mourn a note called "The Phoebus and the Night", the most impressive I ever wrote.

Zweerver

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Kitty, Ally McBeal and Electra - personal note

Oh well... a bit of calm down here tonight, time for the lightest of notes. One of those Kitty personal notes that reveal my real essence, the real me, behind Isobel and wife, behind Ari and writer, the real persona that wanders through these pages with the despair of better days, someone who doesn't bear the timelessness of my glorious characters.

It's been a couple of days I haven't left the apartment and no guilt falls over me, whatsoever. I think we all need periods like that, surrender to life a little bit and let it take us on. My last note on the phenomenology of existence titled after a Platonic statement has shed some light on the subject; probably not light of the phenomena that led to that note but of the "let life take us on". It's such a simple statement yet full of all the courage that I need to achieve one of my very first purposes; lead a life.

My note has shown me personally not by any means lack of knowledge but rather a need to step back, the last weeks have been a constant step back from different chains of events in my life. It's not a bad thing though, as I mentioned previously in some other note the end of my road might constitute the perfect playing field to understand that I should return to the process, where my elucidations of the ultimate man lie; needless to say much less significant though. I should return if not the beginning at least to the flow, to the flow of historicity, the only feasible alternative to my current lack of present, to my lack of universalism and my radical subjectism.

After this long crawling that has lasted for a couple of months already I think it's about time I take my life back in my hands, in my simple understanding I'm still able to fight, I'm still able to run, able to doubt and specially to wander. In these hectic times I don't have the inner power to bear any further moral responsibilities than those imposed on me by society, shall I not become a victim of postmodernism I might not pretend to change the world but follow the underman in his cause; this could perfectly constitute an understatement. I wasn't born to follow the underman, but to die as the ultimate man. Still I can try to pull myself out temporarily from such overcomplicated string of events that are brought along with existence.

Perhaps many years will go by with their summers and their winters, with their lovers and their sorrows, before I can outline the principles of my philosophical system. For now I shouldn't be concerned with anything but sketches and little poems. Let me endeavour my purpose to undertake my education once again and from scratch, it might be the only viable solution for the truely vivifying knowledge I've been searching for. The basic principles have been hardly laid out but I do have a general idea, that I lose all the more as the days sleep away, as I sleep to them away.

It's also very likely that one day I'll wake up from my race, to join the humankind. Should that day come upon me, even if I don't prove myself unsuitable to be a writer, I shall stop writing. I'm still relying on my humanistic approach, so it doesn't depend on me. Unlike my colleagues I'm romantic enough to believe in the helplessness of our kin.

Who knows? I might be eventually able to sail my ship through even darker days, I might even sink into the brighter day. I like the search, I embrace the struggle, befriend the doubt, for I'm expected to do so. Any sign of ultimate security constitutes nothing but a contradiction to my newborn maturity. That, shall refer not to my materializations but to my soul.

Today is a postmodern evening, a time for sympathetic conciliations, a faceless hue. Pathetically funny I sleep on the joys of a new divorcee life, I sleep on the joys of moral irresponsibility. Me, the heaviest of men breaking my unrest. I sympathize with all those lonely men and women of all over the world, with the rest of the ultimate race. I pace down and smoke, slowly but surely I die, in every minute and in every second. I embrace my mortality, as if it was a present from the gods, as if it was the highest of encores.

I lie naked in bed, in the supreme companion of ice cream and wedding stories. Isn't that too much to ask for? I retrieve, I believe. I make funny mental annotations about the future and in my seldom innocence imagine the future of the woman in the novel, imagine her sorrows, imagine her lovers. The air is too light tonight for any other kind of procrastination. It's an almost self-religious evening.

I think about my plans, I think about my life, the unreal life. Yet I lie in bed, I lie in still. I think about him, yeah about Ofer. Don't think I'm being carried away, I simply fantasize. I don't think about Ofer the ultimate man, he's no object for sorrow. I rather think about the Ofer I saw during our last get-together, the Ofer of flesh and bone, the insecure, the immature, the inestable, the unraveled. I truely can say I like him better that way, for being more distant from the journalist and even more from wife, he's simply Ofer. Silences were better spoken than words, the sight more factual than the touch, it was simply beautiful and kindred, yet meaningless.... heading nowhere, in no man's land.

I think about the things I truely hate about him, what I truely detest and actually I don't have a hard time finding them. It comes natural, but you know what? You know why I hate it? Because I damn like him, I think it's his sickening nature what I regard with the highest appeal. His deceive, his poorly contructed strong figure, his unfounded security, his dreadful shallowness. I probably lack of each and every of those things, even in my standing at the root of evil. I honestly adore his evil nature, hence the latest haven't managed to surprise me the slightest bit.

Probably I like the infatuated animal, the one who fades behind the American speech. For shall it be otherwise, I wouldn't be so troubled. But I'm already divorced, so let me wear the weariness of frustration, the weariness of deceive, of oversexualization. I may simply return to the icecream, the novel and other TV magazines. I might simply deceive the natural course of events in feminine surrender, in wasteful remarks.

He doesn't belong to me and I don't belong to his, it's not even worthy another song. Standing on different planets I still idealize, and you know what? I'm closer to reality than I could have ever been. I'm a son of Hesiod and by choice I'm newborn with tightly closed eyes. Call it denial, call it frustration, I'd call it chance. He's never been smaller in my eyes and that's why, my love or whatever this feeling is called has bathed in the comforting waters of surrender. I'm a humanist once again, let life take us on.

This time it's me in the still, the one allowed to silence up. Fortunately and on behalf of my own good name I never gave speeches, I never built morality. I just let myself surrender in thougths and in deeds. Tonight, half naked wrapped in towels, in the drunkenness of youth, I shall be allowed to dream, I shall be allowed to close my eyes once again and for good.

In the end of the day I'm simply twenty, aren't I?






A semiotic continuum of ideas

This is the question of the day, might poetry by itself constitute a whole philosophical system? Might poetry explain the diverse phenomena that connect human existence to its reality determinants such as language and art? Is art a phenomenological manifestation of ideas?

I might return to these ideas later today for I'm very interested in their elucidation.

We'll develop what I'd call a "semiotic continuum of ideas"

The wanderer

I sleep away to life
My years back and forth
My youth rose too high
My days in comfort

The sorrows of the morrow
Bring me back, to and fro
To a sadness that is hollow
Tomorrow in the go

Before I were a song
I was a leaf in the hues
When sung in unison
I turned oak in the Blues

In my sleep you wander
Is the hunter haunted
Souls in slay and wander
A encore is wanted

That is me, I wander
'Ere thy heathen falter
That is me, I pander
I'm the wanderer


This little poem I wrote to myself in this lightweight morning right after I wrote a long phenomenological note. The idea is totally mine and I think it's some English verse, although I did base the rythm on some old Gaelic song, too the emotional milieu. It's a poem about myself, dedicated to no one but myself. With the last poems I've written this week I've started to understand how important the sequence of sounds is important in poetry although it distances me from the Greek convention, but I firmly believe that we modern men don't have enough knowledge to assert how the Greek metre was made, since it was again a matter of sound. English poetry with its adverse spelling shows very well the super-importance of sound in poetry. This is definitely against the conventions of what I'll call hyper-textualism in the future as a school of thought but I certainly enjoy the old-fashioned model, for it refers to my education in the Classics and the heavy mustiness I'm trying to avoid. If my early writings were totally unconventional and super-linguistic, I believe lately I'm returning closer to the convetions, probably after having read many of the Classics in English. I'm convinced that this treatment of conventional forms based on archaic verse will show me the way through this non-conventional almost semiotic poetry I'm intended to write. I've tried before with different sequences and although I haven't failed I think my writing wasn't mature enough at the time. Now I'm apparently starting to understand much better what I'm doing but the task is consuming and is stealing my life as whole. Hereinafter the wanderer shall be my name when writing poetry, for I bear this title even before writing. I believe archaic poetry is the only art that contains that "unified" social science Heidegger is talking about and I might curdle up into it forever, archaic poetry made to be read aloud, instead of "written dead matter". Simultaneously writings seems to be my very best mean of expression, but that extra-linguistic connotation is where my hyper-textualism should be heading to, as expressed in my earliest poetic experiments. I've also written lots of conventional poetry following an English metre that I fed with Greek metaphors, if I ever find the notebooks where those poems were written I shall publish them here too. For now I can only conclude I've undertaken the enterprise of pursuing my education from scratch, I might eventually prove the idea I'm unsuitable for poetry. My poetry in the future should be more of a semiotic understatement than mere English verses, but for now it's plain pretty.

Ari




Response to Manuel Vider and other prolegomena

Dear Manuel,

Following our discussion about the Islamization of Europe that took place on Sunday I would like to continue elucidating the subject, for I believe strongly that our ideas collide at some point. I prefer to do it by writing since I can express myself much better, specially because here I'm not exposed to the linguistic challenge and am able to write in the language I'm best at.

You've talked about the Islamization of Europe by the year 2015 based on a poster that has been distributed over the Internet and that I've myself received a couple of weeks ago. You've noted during the meeting of the literary group that the poster should have been designed and distributed by some right-wing group, which I think it's partially right only in the ground of categoric definition.

I would like to open a discussion based on a Ha'aretz English edition section called "Make your point". In its latest opening has been formulated the question of "What will Israel be like in 25 years from now?". If you haven't read it yet, it is a section in which such questions are formulated and there's space given to the readers of the electronic edition of the newspaper to give their feedback. I've been following it for a couple of months already and I think there's a lot of food for thought there. I shall start this critical note by offering a rehearsal of the full question, following my points whereupon. Shall the above mentioned question hereinafer referred as "the question".

In Herzel's utopian novel of 1902 the so-called state of Israel or the "Altneuland" was referred to as the Jewish state of the future, a technologically advanced state, economically vital and religiously tolerant having built by the time a Third Temple in West Jerusalem. The ideas of Herzel, peak of the German-Jewish haskala of the 19th century Germany born upon the names of others like Mendelsohn and the Post-Kantian idealists have been gathered in the book bearing the title "Die Juedischestaat", that was indirectly created as a response of Herzel's experience with the "Dreyfuss case" in France.

In the awakening of the 21st century and more than a century thereafter Israel is still work in progress, a young state-of-the-art modelled Jewish-democratic state torn apart between the categorizations of both concepts, ideologic and empiric categorizations all the more. A troubled young country deeply rooted in the East and the West, seldom at peace with its neighbours or with herself. Israel constitutes in my views the underdog of post-modern decandence and also an ideological understatement by definition. I'm not referring to the idea of Israel as a modern state of the 21st century but as a national concept, that troubles the minds of the world audience and gathers unsolicited attention as the playingfield of rather dynamic processes of history which break out in a country being led towards two different directions, the East-West inner conflict that places this young nation somewhere in between the axes of evil and the end of history, as a truely unified social science would describe it. Needless to say that such science doesn't exist yet, although I strong believe inasmuch as Heidegger that poetry constitutes such science. I will not curdle up into this topical adventure momentaneously, for this belongs to the field of hyper-structuralism or hyper-textuality (terms coined by myself) as a radically new-old school of thought, whose principles have been nothing but primarily laid out.

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Hence I shall start addressing this note by giving it an introductory title, that I've drawn from my lectures in the good old days of St. Anne's College and that is based on Heidegger's major piece of work, "Sein und Zeit". This note is not intended to be taken seriously for I certainly lack of enough knowledge of my own subject and of the subject in general in order to make it a valuable piece of thought, the opinions here inclusive are totally personal and based on individual hermeneutics, although I might also add I'm indebted for most of its content to my mentor G. Kaltsidou in the Classics seminar and my experience as a conferencist on Marx and the Jewish Question during the year 2002 at the Spanish literature department of the National University.

"Gigantomachia Peri Tis Ousias" - "A battle of giants concerning being", from Plato's Sophist.

The Clash of Civilizations has become a fashionable topic in the classrooms and intellectual circles of the 21st century, several books (which I haven't read) have been published in the subject and different religious, ethical, political, geographical and almost-philosophical approaches have been undertaken. As a classicist I believe there's no utter need to crawl onto the content of such books that have become an underdog and no less an undergod for the lack of social content that has been largely aroused by the fears of a post-end world. It is indeed radical to foresee with prophetic auguries proper of a Greek tragedy, the come about and go of the future in this dystopian era of Biblical odes and mobile phones. Yet any sound intellectual of our times would be likely enough to agree with us that the world of the 20th and 21st century has undergone a cyclic number of changes never experienced before. To some extent even historical anthropologists would agree that the dynamics of history have been altered to a great extent and that the human kind is being led in two different directions, the direction of progress and individual liberties with a sound constitutional ground, and the direction of a struggle between man and its very own nature, obviously product of the first. This struggle also has precedents in the legal ground; our democratic values are being replaced by bipartite judgements that hesitate between the individual liberties and the collective well being. International Law and its inability to prove the righteousness of one side without granting despise and exclusion to the other side are an axiomatic proof of my statement. I'm not demanding anything from the current state of the affairs nor pretend to apply a major change, for it would be a treat to the natural course of history. By doing so I would revert two thousand years back to the days of the Holy Roman Empire that would last a thousand years; I might simply quote Homer when he said "No man is able to run faster than his fate". The Homer scholars would argue with me the context of this phrase whose origin I hesitate about, but I don't pretend to argue with anyone, simply make use of the tools I'm readily in dispose of to desist from my intention to argue the current usability of our legal apparatus.

The modern world is an overregulated haze of unequally distributed wealth and knowledge, being this fact totally unimpressive and predictable. Our conceptualization of justice falls as well under the category of underdog. It is impossible to a great extent to predict what the world will be like within 25 years and even within 25 hours, 11th September and no less dramatic, the foundational stone of the State of Israel are loyal proves of this statement. Without overidealizations it's not, however, difficult to display a certain number of facts that govern our current societies and discuss their outcome in mathematical terms, probability statistics and basic computer operations prove this. Maybe not for the sociologist and much the less for the philosopher; if we're talking about predictability environmentalists are probably the only ones that would claim before us, wannabe thinkers, that the sorrows and morrows of this planet are contained in a time-bomb whose biological clock tickles every year as ice melts down and temperature goes up.

I'm not an expert in history and that probably doesn't interest me that much, yet as an observer and at the same time citizen of a small Mediterranean state I'm certainly interested in the outcome of this so-called history. I don't pretend to foresee major changes in the American economy or in the Israeli military history, neither pretend to foresee major changes in my neighborhood or circle of friends. Being to a large extent Descartian myself I prefer to focus on less meaningful and epistemological clusters of science rather than attempting to embrace the whole spectrus with fatalist despise. I've read several books of political and legal theory over the last couple of years and have poisoned my Classical education with the bitter taste of supra-national ideas and globalization premises. Those books although very well written and explanatory and on their base several lectures imparted in American universities, haven't contributed even minimally to shape my opinions on the challenges faced by this world.

I'm not a very opinionated intellectual since the scope of my studies hasn't been certainly broad and I haven't watched television over a period of 6 years. My married life with the Internet hasn't been very fruitful either, for beyond casual sex and wasteful letters I haven't pursued any enterprise other than achieving an unexpected distancing from piles of unread books that make up the only art-decor of my living room. Still I've been in close contact with other more vivifying scienes such as the art of poetry, love relationships and music in the underneath. I can't claim either that I'm ignorant as I pretended to do over the last months, just following the trends of the latest Scandinavian art schools, since my awareness of the injustices of the world has increased as I've been living in the Middle East. It doesn't steal my sleep though, other less phenomenological thoughts do instead.

In this selfness I've been living during the last years of my life, the current events of the world haven't managed to surprise me even a tiny bit; not being a negative person myself I can just say I've spent more time among children's books and poems and have received a more fruitful education from them. That goes without saying that I've also pursued an extensive but incomplete Classical education that has led me to the conclusion that I'm totally unsuitable to become a classicist by all means. Yet I shouldn't refrain from writing, from being an unread writer, and from writing this note in which I pretend to explain my sympathy for the Clash of Civilizations from the perspective of the poet, the perspective that suits better my diseased personality right after the perspective of the lawyer. But being a lawyer wouldn't allow me to understand the conflictive nature of the matter, for the laws of men have been led astray from the individualist nature of man itself and constitute only a legal binding that justifies the rightdoing-wrongdoing apluralistic duality in the eyes of the collective well-being, being that totally antidemocratic in my eyes, for the justifications and motivations behind well-educated ivy-league ties and suits don't really represent the echoes that arise in the background of the mobile phone age. Our second ice age.

I'm truely not concerned with the Islamization of the "Federal States of Europe" and the circumstancial events that have led to this situation for I understand them as natural processes in a chain of events that links us as post-modern citizens with the ideas of our forebearers back in times up to the age of the most privimitives peoples of the world. Shall I be found guilty of supporting terrorism by making this explicit statement I must say I have no solid ground to justify myself and I'll aid the tribunal of my judgement to find my guilt, for I belong to no social class known by our standards and as a man of the world I prefer to be set at the root of evil than in the gates of heaven. I shall as well add it's no easy task to undertake the position in which I find myself tonight, since what I'm doing is explicitly justifying the domination of a technically inferior culture over the white supremacy. The last two-thousand years have brought along different sequences that make possible for the human being to understand the bias under which its current livelihood was built; we've developed our societies to a point in which I could say man has acquired a natural and self-deceiving ability to deny its very own nature which is by default, and since the Garden of the Paradise, destructive.

After two thousand years I might say I was born to a generation that is without hesitations witnessing the very end of history as we know it, the end of the chronology and the synchrony and the state-construction model as the very first linguist would define it. History has taken a u-turn without giving us a previous notice. The modern nations, unlike those of Babylon and Sparta have failed to understand history as a process rather than as an end, and they've struggled to an enormous extent to bring history to an end with a relative rate of success. Welfare systems and highly competitive individuals in the global market don't speak by our society, these are mere inventions that bring along a revolution in the customs and outlook of the human supremacy just like the invention of scripture and the wheel did. The ancient peoples, whose wisdom hasn't all come down to us but lost on the way back and forth, understood that their existence was part of a fluctuation of ideas, that constitute the very core of humanity, or in words of Parmenides "to gar auto noein estin te kai einai" (for thinking and being are the same). The same challenges of the primitive pelasgus that inhabitated the Old continent are born as a burden on the back of our politicians and highly cultured invidividuals, to this same extent the development of social "factus" constitute nothing but the struggle of man against himself and the divine revelation of his destructive "state-of-being" (using a word less extensive than condition).

Society finds itself to very a big extent exactly in the same place where it was at the beginning of history, with a radical different though. Our society as we know it stands nowadays on a very thin wire which approximates its end. Leaving asides the materialization of the world and turning our lives into a phenomenologic state human history is nothing but predictable. I'm not talking about kabbalistic ends of appocalyptic dimensions but simple retrieval. We've come to a point in which our materializations of the world as entities have come to take over our unmaterialized phenomena and radically succeed; just like an Icelandic singer claims that the modern things have been waiting on the top of a hill to descend and take over, in an unfinished state of being which requires human permission to take over, human surrender. I would call it deconstructed state, a certain grammar term. Our modern nations stand on the point right beyond this de-construction; on an edge in which it is not the lack of a glorious or pain past what is to trouble us, it is not the lack of future what is meant to trouble us either. It is indeed the lack of present. Present is not simply a categoric statement or a state-of-being, it's in my opinion rather a flow in terms of the Logos. The materializations of our ideal state of being have brought this simple difficulty, in which we contradict Aristotle's Metaphysics when he claims that "being is the most universal concept". Any Greek-educated reader would say the translation is inaccurate for critical purposes, for "to on esti katholou malista panto" states that "being" ("to on" not as a constructed thing itself but as a constant-state-of-being) is the most universal of things above "all" or "the everything" ("panto", that is also interpreted as "one", all things constitute nothing but "one", unicity). Parting from this overcomplicated conceptualization of ideas we can infere that unbeing has turned out to become the most universal concept. Humanity has for long lost the dimension of its own existence and has turned its back to the natural course of events, with the firm believe that the material supremacy of human kind is meant to take over simple events such as the weather and wars. But nature has been tested and self-certified for over thousands of years, how are we able to neglect those elucidations? On the ground of our materialized-un-being?

Religion brings a differently similar viewpoint, for the Genesis and the Greek mythologies with their background bring with themselves events of a similar kind, in which men are condemned by default to fight against their own cause, turning their existence into a metaphysical phenomenon that can't be explained in simple words, shall it be explained in the words of the poet or in the words of the philosopher (not the philosopher, but the one who might know the philosophy) is hardly ever understood for extra-linguistic unity is primarily individual inasmuch as religion. Religion as a human creation was also designed to take over, what would primarily constitute an element of power in an ungoverned world would become the foundational stone of the legal systems of the West, as it is in the case of the Roman Law, the Talmudic Law and the Islamic Law. The three of them born to the undivisible marriage of theology (or theologems), mythology (or mythologems) and the need for an orderly society. Thereinafter religion would bring upon us a legal binding that would delimit democracy, consent and the deed-consequence duality in terms of a certain particular belief, which redundantly was believed to be upright. Religion, one of the biggest curses of humanity that was created by men in order to establish rules for men with a belief in an afterlife that would justify the process not as a process but as an end. Religion, inasmuch as a technocratic era, were carefully planned and put into action with the simple purpose to delimit the material input of men in its own world, to the same extent that law, first-born son of religion has done ever since. Human kind is meant to be constructed and not destroyed, but deconstructed by its own hand. Its existence in the eyes of history is probably meant to be circumstancial and not conditional; being the greatest civilizations of our world a first-hand example. I wouldn't like to include among these the Peoples of Israel, whose existence constitute a totally different phenomenological "fatus" to which we'll return at a later stage.

This world in which we live is by no means condemned to disappear, neither are we in my humble opinion, yet I firmly believe the so-called Greco-Semitic lie of Nietzsche has come to an end. I would disagree with Nietszche that God is dead, yet its creator is plain dead and has given preponderance to its creation, has deconstructed itself as an slave of his creation and surrendered. There's an evident need for a change in the dynamics of the process and humanity in its current developed state is unable to bring this change to light. A kin that can't demistify itself and replace itself as a natural process due in course of time is very unlikely to be able to hold the rides of history, the endeavour. The technological advance of the world in unable to cope with the nature of man, with his loneliness, with his primary needs. The world is unable to allow the philosopher to live a minute beyond his words, for from beyond the graves he's risen up, but others his language fail to understand. A world of signified instead of signifiers, that's what we've become.

The computer era is the most impressive of examples, the reivindication of "deus est machina" in the end of times. We're approaching the days when the machines, our simple unnatural creations, are meant to bear a life of their own and take us on. The global town in which the national boundaries have been broken and that have opened a gate for the mutual interaction of persons is another of these placebos. A newborn religion in which strings of powers are inasmuch held, an absorbing religion that have separated us from all what was known before; looking into the future is not very difficult when you've seen the most brilliant science fiction films of our times. A combination of wires and network adapters that connect people to their own selfness. A powerful imaginary world that not even the subconscious of Freud and Jung would have explained back and forth. A wired world. As an overinfatuated intellectual of my times I also make part of this global town, a stateless world, an supra-verbal world. And I stare with nothing but despise at the current advances of computational linguistics and information theory, I'm still glued to a screen, living my life in a current state of "unbeingness". In the meantime the strings of the world are held just like they were held in the most primitive time. Back then we called fire, now we call it oil, tomorrow we'll call it water or simple air.

It's difficult for me to think I'd be any surprised about the current endeavours of this world, and up to this day nothing has truely surprised me other than the Classics and the most primitive feelings of men, the real core of things. The world of the phenomenological outside the scope of the post-Aristotelian materializations, including God. The honest truth is, I can't really figure out the future as a state of tolerance and open boundaries, for they by definition contradict the definition of men. I rather opt for the cluster of a newborn oscurantism which will breed a new society again. Instead of progressing we've spent the last decades going totally backwards, as I mentioned previously, reaching the end of history.

And all this I haven't learn by myself no, I haven't learnt it from the musty lectures of professors or from the latest books about theory of chaos and fashionable kabbalistic post-Jungian psychiatrists. I must confess I've gathered all these almost appocalyptic conclusions from a superficial reading of Hesiod the poet. Hesiod, who was probably recorded by the eddas more than two-thousand years ago set the political and epistemological foundations of my statement. He didn't do it through overcomplexations of basic facts as I've done in previous paragraphs and neither through prophetic statements or unreadable sentences.

Hesiod simply said: "In those days children will be born with their eyes open, with their eyes wide open"

This is probably the strongest historical statement ever made, and to the same extent the most largely neglected. As we approach the modern times men are expected to grow and develop faster, to undertake a career and marry, obtain mortgage loans and provide for their posterity. We're those children of the eyes wide open, in the painful awareness of the world we live in. Our children are those children of the eyes wide open. If you were to ask me what Israel or the world will be like in 25 years, I'd simply respond by quoting the poet and saying "in those days children will be born with eyes open, with their eyes wide open".

Those children lost in the limbo of post-modern ambitions become the victims and the fighters of post-modernism, the ultimate phase of evolution, the newborn son of men. And understand the different between the newborn son of man and the first-born son of God. I believe in the creative power of destruction as it's written in the Genesis, "And God said, let there be light, and there was light". In the deconstructed world of the poet the phenomena should take precedence to its manifestations, unlike the modern languages in which the phenomena have been largely replaced by material manifestations of thought, which connect ideas within a black hole that would be accurately defined as a semiotic continuum, or under-verbalization.

Just as it was explained in the Bible, "But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die". This is one of the strongest statements made in the Bible, certainly not by God but by men, for the language of the divine shall be unspoken or self-contained inasmuch as the language of the Logos that unsuccessfully Parmenides the philosopher attempted to explain.

I'm deeply touched specially by the segment "knowledge of good and evil", which is probably what better describes the state of the affair in which we stand at the moment. Our factual knowledge of good and evil shall become the primary cause of our death, of a certain death that took place when our children started to be born with their eyes wide open. It's almost scholastic morality. Our knowledge of good and evil has placed our society in the beginning of history, in which the days would sleep away without regard to our knowledge and death would approach us at a faster speed. We don't die younger than we did 100 years ago or even 50, but our lives are spent before they are lived, a rally of empowerment and idealizations of a perfectly engineered life. When we break the national boundaries we create supra-national icons of power that re-write religion and re-write god and re-write men by categoric definition. Our lives have for long stopped being contemplative experiences in order to become radicalisms and polarizations which we could have only learned by eating from the tree of good and evil. There's no moral lesson intended here, it's a simple outline of the "fatus" that govern the current state-of-being rather than our existence itself. The tree of good and evil has erradicated the protestant ethics, has erradicated the middle classes, has erradicated the average man. Looking into the future this extra-polarizations make this world a complicated place to live in, in which all those unbridged gaps tend to disappear based on theories of power. Not in the theories of power that have been perfectly laid out by the new sociology, not really. By the theories of power of Sparta, of Maquiavelo, of Rome. We're being deconstructed before the helpless fury of God, who to a large extend allegedly ignores what his world is made of, what his phenomenology has taught us for.

We're being deconstructed by our own nature, I'm not foreign to this process, I'm just stranged from the end. The postmodern world with its victims and fighters has done nothing but erased history to a large extent. Now there's nothing left but the ultimate man, and the first man. The superman and the underman. Unfortunately I could count myself in the category of the supermen, overinfatuated and oversexualized, empowered member of society, productive, timeless, accurate, factual, pragmatic and idealized. The superman or the ultimate man is condemned to disappear and to allow the underman to return to his position in the cycle and to continue with the dynamics of history. To that same extent it doesn't surprise me at all that we, the ultimate men, haven't been able to wipe out from the surface of the earth to the first man, to the underman.

Not even our state-of-the-art technology, airplanes, tanks and missiles will wipe out the underman, for he's been raised for an ulterior purpose, for a purpose that exceeds the limits of our short and politically correct livelihood. His purpose is no other than immortality. We've been sleeping in the fields while a whole generation of undermen has been rising from beyond our underways. A generation of undermen whose eyes are still not open and who haven't eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A generation like the first generation, before Adam and Eve, a generation that doesn't "see".

Yes, our libraries will disappear and our philarmonics, our centers of instructions and our symbols of power, the Teutonic myth will simply grow stronger, for he's strong and he's human. More human that our New Yorker divinities, more human than stocks and shares. You and whose army? O Holy Roman Empire? You and your cronies? Will you take us on? Our destiny is to confront those who don't see, and with our eyes wide open we'll see them taking over.

The current war of the Western world against Islam doesn't really surprise me at all, and I've become a rather passive player in the context of my own national identity. Call me a victim of postmodernism if you want, but I personally surrender. Justice is nothing but the mother of all evils and to her we're not called for. The tank can't surpass the stone, and no education of men can surpass the power of wrath and hate, just like in the beginning of times. They still remember history for they haven't been taught, they still remember history in the primitive form of myths and tellings, they still remember the process and the end don't attempt to foresee. We've seen the end, and once that happens we're just being directed towards it. Let America be afraid, for if they weren't to suffer the fate of Rome no fear would invade their homes.

History won't change tomorrow and probably not in 25 years, I'm not so convinced that we'll see the return happen, but it'll haunt us, just like dreams do. But history by definition must return to itself and the ultimate man, the superman won't achieve to halt it, nature has been proven, immortality of men has not. Ask the Caesar if you still hold doubt.

In the meantime let me sleep away in the procrastination proper of an ultimate man, for I'm no wise men in the arts or thinker of great heights. I'm a simple man, let me spend my wasteful youth between casual toys of deliverance and embrace the old age with despise, longing for what's there forlorn. Let me become an American, an oversexualised object of thought, for I'm young, nice-looking and well-fit, let me take over the world before it takes me on. I believe I can change the world, I just need a career, a man and a house before I can sit quiet and do it. Isn't it so easy to falter?

The ultimate man will become of the last of men, and shall my life constitute the subject and not the object this search. And shall I find any answers that might demistify the ultimate man I rather by slain in my mortality, for I have no pretensions to long otherwise. Let my life be short and infatuated, that's what we're called for. In the awakening of time, as written in the apoccalyptic prophesy, each and every man will "close his eyes and observe". Heidegger would perfectly elucidate the point I want to make, but we really should leave that for some other time.

Parmenides said:

"Of the Logos which as I describe it man always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos man are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution they wake up just as they forget what they do when they sleep".

It's time for some American movies, sexual radicalism, relief to the poor and CNN. Please ladies and gentlemen, turn your TV on.


Ari Akkermans



----------------------------------------------------
End of note 1
Note 2: The Jewish Question
Note 3: Greece, The Nazi Party and America

Sunday, September 26, 2004

I'm in bereavement therapy - Therapist Fashion (II)

Scene I

W. - Good morning. I've seen your add in the newspaper. Oh well sorry I'm lying, I received it from a friend who claims to know you very well. You've been recommended.
S. - Good morning, would you like to make an appointment or simply obtain a referral for another professional?
W. - Actually I'd just like to know if you'll be available for therapy over the next few months, I want to think if I really want to do this. It's probably a little bit over my head.
S. - Ah now I see, just another frustrated woman who picks up the phone to book a therapist, unorthodox and unconventional. And then you ask me if I'll be available for therapy over the next few months. What are you taking me for? Am I gastro-enterologist?
W. - I beg your pardon?
S. - Monday, 27th September. 18:00, be on time.
W. - But... I just wanted to...
S. - Just be on time, you can smoke yes, bring your own though.

Scene II

S. - Name?
W. - Wife.
S. Huh? that means I shall address you as wife? Do you bear a name by any chance?
W. - Not yet, I'm only the character of an unwritten novel, I don't bear a name yet. But I'm a lawyer, a successful lawyer, I passed my bar examination and practice private law.
S. - So you're telling me you're a lawyer, you're a wife and you don't have a name because you're only a character of an unwritten novel. Do you expect me to take you on?
W. - Where shall I sit? I smoke a lot, do you mind me opening a window?

Scene III

S.- Wife please, tell me who is your husband? I need a reference point, as long as you don't have name and basically nothing but a coat and clouds of smoke, I need a reference point. Maybe your husband knows your name?
W. - My husband is another character of the novel, actually he's a character of another novel. In that novel we're not married anymore, that's why I'm here.
S. - Your husband's name?
W. - I told you, he's a character of an unwritten novel, in that novel it's claimed that he's a journalist, but the evidence shows he turned out to be a man of flesh and bones. I have no ground to support he's a journalist, not even that he's ever been a husband at all.
S. - Maybe we could invite to this room the author of such novel? As far as I'm concerned, you're no real persona yet, neither your journalist is. Maybe it's him, the writer who needs a therapist, no?
W. - No, the author of the novel is no real persona either. There's only one non-fictional character in the book, a girl by the name of Isobel. The daughter of a wolf that dwells on a forest surrounded by a river ninefold.
S. - If there's no real persona in the book you claim to belong to, and the writer is no real persona either, why then do you claim to be lawyer?
W. - I was told yesterday
S. - I don't really understand what I can do for you, it seems to me you don't really exist. I've had all kind of different abnormal patients and frustrated women in particular but this is unconceiveable.
W. - The author of the novel has a friend, a young man. He's behind every line. A couple of weeks ago I used to be the main character of the novel. Everyone loved me, in particular my husband. Behind my husband there is a real persona, the friend of the author and the real persona of my husband have sustained a relationship for sometime. A relationship that only a writer can understand. This relationship troubles me deeply, for my husband is not really my husband anymore. I've been left out of the novel, even as lawyer who can sue for indiscriminate exclusion on the ground of sex and age. The such friend and the real persona behind my husband have started another novel that hasn't been written yet. I can't take it, I just can't take it. A couple of days ago I saw them together, I think it was in a poem that was never written.
S. - Hummmm I seem to start understanding. Do they have a theme?
W. - A theme? what are you talking about? You claim to start understanding and now you're worried about whether they have a theme? Which kind of therapist are you? I'm telling you I lost my husband because he went to another novel, with a friend of the writer. With one of the faces of the writer. You are asking me whether they have a theme?
S. - Which kind of patient are you, just to start with?
W. - The other face of the writer is just a beautiful young man, a very attractive man. Yet someone who is unable to love, and even more unable to be loved. They suffer together, they're terribly unhappy and are cursed by the lack of unawareness, they don't really make any sort of companion but an extraordinary lack of it. I was very different, I was loving, I was loved, I was companion.
S. - Just because you're a woman?
W. - No, because I was a character of the novel.
S. - Would you mind to smoke less next time?

I'm in bereavement therapy - critical note (I)

Early morning, still writing, coffee, nicotine and drunk in the ironic joys of frustration. At this time of the day I pretend to write a note, a simple note. This is by far not a philosophical note, neither a philological note. It's rather a pathetic note and little talk. Ari and wife are quarrelling again, and hence a note should come out if and a few clarifications.

We've been for long mistaken in the storyline for wife constitutes no philologist, the only true philologist in the story is not even me, but Ari. The first-born son of the tenth Muse and favourite in the Helicon, that's him. The little lion. The wife is actually a lawyer, the product of consumption and beauty, of the appalling shallowness of urban life, of American life. Yes, are you surprised? Well I'm even more, the last two days have brought into light this terrifying truth, wife is a lawyer. She's one of those you know, with smart suits, shoes and capuccino. She ain't no traditional lawyer, for she's an awful ivy-league product, not sure if Radcliffe or St. John's, but simply a dirty lawyer.

One of those women who was born dreaming about the day of her wedding, her little house and garden, children and traditionalism which obviously contradicts herself being the icon of cosmopolitan life. The working wife, talented professional and almost male sexy individual, an emblem of power. Wife is one of those little women who pretend to change the world, yet not minding a husband, a house and little petty things. She's living in several dualities though, for she can't disregard the presence of Ari and his lack of shallowness, his heavyweight and almost divine wrath, looking at immortality with despise and product of a long bygone morality you can only learn when studying the Classics by yourself, a stranged son of St. Anne's College. Ari is a stateless man, the personification of darkness and a total stranger, Ari is himself by himself and with himself. Wife is standing somewhere else, she's an American, a woman born to predicate the first amend to our constitution, our freedom of speech. Despite her heels she regrets each and every line in the freedom of speech act, being nothing but minimally constitutional herself. Wife is a fan of Sheryl Crow and Alanis Morisette, Tori Amos, even Paula Cole. A starbucks woman, lots of evidentially not surprising facts.

Even so she's unable to disregard Ari and hence her frustration. No wonder Ari's got this natural sympathy for female frustration and wasteful soul searching. How could she ever think of changing the world? Isn't it a little bit of wishful thinking? I mean, that's something people like Ari are supposed to do, yet he's passively letting life take on and enjoying the irreparability of modern life while wife spends endless hours trying to set up new patterns for a new world, which basically doesn't have constitutional ground.

Wife and the journalist have spent some time together in the previous days, and in between cups of coffee (!) and rye they've managed to get along, to talk friendly talk and just undo the world. This mere fact surprises her enormously and her moral as a lawyer and as a woman of the 2000's is deeply injured from the chain of events that led to this encounter. This fact shouldn't surprise us, for firstly the roles were turned upside down, wife in the shade and Ari upfront, wife in hush and Ari in the rush. She curdles up into the terrible of frustration of staring at the scene, from behing the background, from where the lights are dimmed out and on. She felt missing out, slowing down and that, from the perspective of radical feminism turns her into the weakest of figures that ever walked down our plots, a radically meaningless figure, a "dead matter" in words of some philological expert.

Her frustration stems from one very fact: Ari can change the world, his passiveness and allegedly painful awareness change the world, yet wife in her beauty and charm, in her pleasant talk and extremely sensualized feminine motions didn't achieve to change not even the mere course of things, not even a word that was meant to be unsaid. The day slept away and the morning came, Ari and the journalist, wife in the sides. Her unawareness called denial, her radical happiness called denial, her lack of frustration called denial, all those things together couldn't change the world. She's still married, or apparently pretending to be, married to an endless number of pretensions that can be perfectly worn on Friday, even on Sunday. I think she apparently hates him, she hates Ari. This hatred is deep rooted actually, she hates his passiveness and his lack of willingness, his lack of momentum for a change, his lack of success, his storm. But what she hates the most above all is that she damn likes him, finds him an icon of admiration, the self-indulged male on whom any female of the world would lean on without consultation, with icy bites of admiration. If she's a successful woman, born to the modern world, extremely well educated and exotically beautiful, sexy, talented and career-focused, hard working and emancipated. Why couldn't she change this damn world and could he instead?

She tried to find some comfort on Elliot, but the writer deceives her royally by simply silenting up. Is it because he's a gay man? Is it because he can just have meaningless sex and walk out? Is it because he's young and well-fit? Hummm... not really. His emotional landscape is another puzzle which we hardly should curdle up into, feminine enough not to be understood. Last night was a prove that no, this is definitely not it.

He's far more insecure, far more infatuated and far less palpable. In the end of the day he's just fucking twenty, he's not meant to understand all those little issues of wives and house appliances, he's an intellectual too, he's got no time for that non sense. Yet an issue troubles him deeply, he's painfully aware, it's no fun to be a genius specially when you lack of the emotional skills to deal with it, it's no fun to have nowhere to cry. His awareness is nothing but a curse, a curse that isn't at ease. He envies her unawareness, her natural deceiving ability for denial, her self-destructive soul. It's very easy to sympathize with others that way, to befriend people... to awaken pity and simply live up to it. It's no hard task to befriend wife, she's so sweet and charming, she's just all that. Ari lives on a different core, always untouched, always unreached, always allienated. Probably an interesting guy, a sophisicated and high leveled guy yet difficult to chew, too much heavyweight in one man, too much to swallow in one simple go. If so, why does he outreach? How does he manage to change the world being all that? How did he manage to changer HER world if he's all that? Wife is mere simplicity, an easy thing to get hold on, to get rid of. This is her major frustration, a wife that can't take over a young confused man, she just can't. Her lightweight is just unable to fight back, the negative that doesn't beat the positive, it's just helplessness.

Wife the lawyer can't truely understand the events of her life, how could she be just left out? How could a man, an average man, simply not understand everything she's made of? Everything she's fought for? Everything she's worth? Why would her marriage fail? Maybe she just needs another woman in the middle? A haircut that would define her as a radical powerful feminist or a less oversexualized touch? How could her marriage fail, she constitutes nothing but a perfect wife? Who could do better than that?

How could a man be non-responsive to love? How could he resist her delicate touch? Why couldn't he understand her sensibilities? Her maturity. She's not a spring chicken anymore, she must be concerned. It's about time to build a life, to hold onto a man, to occupy some physical space and to embrace the conventions of the world, she's no little girl. Why doesn't he understand her issues? She's just a woman, biology does the job. He's just a man too, what the heck went wrong?

Didn't she read enough self-help books? Or was it just the aggressive suit? Too provokative for a self-centered and overinfatuated man? She just fails to understand. Ari in the other hand laughs in ironic despair, he can just laugh and silent up. How could he ever cope with her life and her posessions much better than she herself did? If she was born for this world. She needs to find some missing screws in her head, she truely needs to and the scotch doesn't really seem to help, the unsuccess of other women doesn't seem to help either.

Don't take me wrong, this is no little story, she's no little wife. This is no cheap plot. We're just heading somewhere else. Wife's got to comfront someone, to bring herself upfront. She needs some help, she needs a therapist, an unorthodox and non-conventional therapist. We'll witness a couple of different sessions (about whose timing and sequence I can't promise anything), she'll be just storming up. I really wish for a better version of this plot because I still lack of the strength to make anything valuable out of it, but I'm truely not so concerned since I have the security this story will be written down many times. I think probably the story shouldn't start here but in the next chapter, for I have the firm conviction a good story starts only by the middle and in the beginning it ends.

Ari

Claims

In the aftermath of Yom Kippur I just wanted to start with something light and not so defined, I worked on several ideas during this weekend, watched a couple of films and also rehearsal from good old American TV; you'd say it doesn't really match my personality but I guess you're mistaken. In between all my heavyweight I can't claim I'm a true intellectual for I sicken with a very high dose of self-infatuation and banality, in that order of ideas I've been very interested lately in finding those cores that make of me a perfect example of what a victim of post-modernism is, of what a fighter of post-modernism is. Somehow despite my acute sense of observation and diseased emotional condition I'm urged to explain those things and develop them as much as I can cope with them. Life isn't such safe ground, it's more like a stage and I seem to like it in some kind of way.

I walked through many different paths in the previous days and my just-about-to-come notes will reflect it all throughout, I'm still not satisfied with my English and my level of vocabulary as I still believe I'm very poor in expression.That will eventually be made up for. I don't think Isobel will ever be a coherent story neither a series of poems. I think in the end of the line Isobel will constitute a daring example of extra-linguistic writing, probably Isobel will be concluded with no more than a few words. I'm still overly wordy and intellectualoid to do that but a bit more of flow with the Logos will certainly show me the way. I'm convinced of it.

Why did I title this note as "claims"? Because in the future I want to be a lawyer, probably the only real profession I'm emotionally qualified for, despite my Tracian sense of morality which has been by a large extent discouraged by the situations I've been myself at during the last two years. I don't want just to be a lawyer but I want to open a trial against myself and to find myself guilty; let's not say guilty but rather unfit to be a writer, unfit to be a philologist.

I've attempted to write such a note several times and have royally failed, probably because my language is still not expressive enough or my general knowledge not sufficiently broad. Still I've come to the conclusion this note shouldn't be the first of my notes but rather the last and the discovery of the ground for my claims should constitute a fulfilling career and an art despite the fogs of the storm I'm walking through, which is simply called life. The life of an average young man. My claims are rather a process than an end.

Ironically enough everything I write in order to proof myself unlikely or just not suitable to be a writer is highly literary and everything I write in order to proof myself unlikely or just not suitable to be a writer is highly philological. People will certainly disagree with me but I pretend to be nothing but a lawyer and my client (myself) is paying the bucks for me to find him guilty. This open-ended case might last for a lifetime.

Perhaps I'm most likely not to be found unsuitable to be a writer for everything that is in the background behind my notes is fully representative of a writer's life and deeds. Yet I pretend as a talented lawyer to sell them an idea instead of the real facts. It's not my literary or intellectual talent what must disquality me from being a writer but rather my idea. The most powerful force right after my animal killer instinct.

I pretend to spend the rest of my life disqualifying myself as a writer, even if that demands attending law school for the honourable sake of my purpose. It's like being torn apart between two different worlds, no matter how much I yearn to return to the classrooms of St. Anne's and St. Claire's where my adolescence was spent among the Classics, I could perfectly forego that since I'm not interested in becoming a philologist or a writer by all means. A year ago I could constitute the perfect example of what a philologist is and actually I was one.

One day near the peak of my knowledge and just right before pursuing my way into the graduate school at Tel Aviv University I desisted, too I desisted from writing and ironically enough that boasted my literary talent to a point in which writing became something more than an obsession, a way of life. But the point here is, I started to find myself too ignorant and uninterested and emotionally unsuitable to become a philologist. My humanist attempt to start my readings all over again since the scratch proved nothing but the fact that I never really learnt anything and that my head is nothing but an empty canvas. I also desisted from writing my own personal manifesto (not Isobel's) in which I would lay out the principles of what I would call hyper-structural poetry, hyper-structuralism, a linguistic-literary school. Almost Semiotic school. I desisted from my conceptualization of what poetry should be like in our days and looking up into the future because I'm simply no writer at all. Even in the language I command the best (which is English) I'm unfit for writing.

I rather become a lawyer to support my claim. I will prove myself as an average man of the 21st century, a victim of post-modernism and gay American life, a victim of television and consumption, a victim of selfishness and individualism. I will not prove myself just unsuitable for being a writer but also innocent, for I'm nothing but a victim of my own generation, a victim of modern times. I've just been victimized by my own talent, just like gay men are victims of freedom constitutional acts and just like feminist women are victims of ultra-liberal working environment policies.

In the meantime there're many things I want to write about so I can finally conclude such note about me being unsuitable for being a writer, and one step before another note about the victims of post-modernism. Those notes above mentioned don't constitute real notes themselves but rather mechanically engineered processes that require a modular progression, simple processes. In the meantime I'm in need to delimit the thematic axes on which my writing will rest.

1. My influences
- The Classics above all (The Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Tragics, Early Mythology, Homer, Aeolic poetry, Schools of Thought)
- The Bible
- Romantic, Victorian, Symbolist and Existentalist Writers
- Theory of Chaos (as a methodological idea)
- The Protestant Ethics (in particular Calvin)

2. Thematic axes
- Gay American life
- American media and women
- Post-modernism
- Secular Judaism/ Israel-Diaspora Social Constructions
- Echoes of the Protestant Society, deconstruction of values, social cohesion
- Religion and women
- Archaic poetry
- Linguistic Schools
- Bible hexegesis
- Mythology
- Social Anthropology

3. What will I write (about) ?
- Isobel
- Thematic articles (see above)
- Poetry
- Personal Notes
- Legal framework of my claims (based on American law)
- Hyper-structural poetry (I've coined the term)
- Streams of Consciousness

4. How will I proceed to achieve all that?

In the meantime I've already re-started the Classics and the major texts on the subject such as Kerenyi, Jung, Otto and other scholars. I'm pursuing my grammar lessons from scratch and I pretend this work will conclude with some serious contribution to the field within the two subjects that interest me the most, Archaic poetry and mythology. You would wonder how I pretent to disqualify myself to be a philologist by factually becoming one, I must say as a vissionary person that it's probably the only way. The only way to disquality myself from this profession is by exploring it in depth. I will prove not only that I'm no philologist but that I'm emotionally unable to approach the subject better known as philology. I'm not ready to study philology.

I'll pursue investigations in other fields and recreate the real persona of Isobel by writing about her and thus, be able to disqualify myself as a writer as well. During my writings (like I did in my early writing of 2003) I'll explore in depth the shallowness of my generation and to which extent belonging to it disqualifies me from being the type of writer I'm expected to be. Yes, I'll be a writer and a philologist, only in order to prove my claims that I'm not either. Isobel requires even harder work than the philologist for her scope is pretty broad, it will include reviewing a few languages I attempted to learn in the past, complementary readings and the study of comparative linguistics.

Then I'll pursue some law studies but I'm not sure about how this point might come along, we'll eludicate better in the years to come. Attempting to be a philologist and to recreate Isobel might take me actually a whole lifetime, hence we might try some parallel kind of thing. I have no intention to be a lawyer whatsoever and it's one of the professions I most highly despise and would certainly regret, for I'm aware enough of the unfairness of this world and its lack of justice as to become the signifier of those predicaments. Again, I'm just being the thing I hate the most: An American. The Classics themselves will introduce me to the foundations of Western law, I'll take it from there.

I'll live my life, a writer's life to prove that in the end of the day I'm unsuitable for such life and that it would be too pretentious to say I'm emotionally built for that, my readings of Elliot have elucidated this point extenstively but I won't dig deep down into it for sometime.

Unfortunately I must say (sorrowfully) this note constitutes not only the first of my claims but also the manifesto of my artistic work, and shall hereinafter any doubt on my pursuances revert to this note. I also omitted one obvious point; I've got to learn some good English instead of this quasi-Chinese pidgin I'm writing in.

Since this is a blog this note shall perfectly constitute simply a brain trip, but let time decide. I might not live long enough to see all this coming through, or life might just take me on. I hope you all can understand me but these claims shall constitute the obsession of my life only the ground that I need to save me from myself, from my heavy weight, from my intellectual obsessions. In the case I don't live enough to see all this happening I will have been proven wrong and whoever will read these pages will wonder about my mental condition. But I'm not to blame, I was just born in the wrong generation yet lacking of enough emotional skills to cope with the life I was meant to live. If my last wish would be granted to me today, I would ask without hesitation to be able to sleep, slow down and die in the procrastination of post-modern life. I would just ask not to sympathize with female frustration.

Yet such pleasure wasn't granted to me, "I'm from beyond the grave and there's nothing I can do for you" in words of Rimabud the poet. Let me endeavour this ultimate purpose, for my life is a constant search, and whenever I reach an end I just step back and return to the search. Let my life be a process, not an end.

Ari

Friday, September 24, 2004

Frustrated note

Near the peak of my frustrations I dwell; for I have attempted for a week to write a note in which I elucidate certain points about art and poetry, about literary creation, mythology, Logos and philosophy. The note hasn't come through since I've been always interrupted either by a friend, either by an idea, either by a phone call.

I wanted to talk about the death of the writer, making it clear the death of the writer comprises many other topics I shall devote myself to in the future. I want to claim and manifest I'm no poet or other kind of artist for I totally lack of the knowledge, the wisdom and acute of observation of the world that are necessary for the mother of the arts. I want to make observations about the poor language in which I write and how needlessly elevated it is leaving all content asides.

Yet I haven't been able to write this note, instead I've been writing poetry. Quartets in verse without syllabic counting yet according to my knowledge I've had but a few mistakes following the metric pattern. Despite the overwhelming influence held unto me by my Greek education I've stemmed a few ideas of my own that I hold for a couple of years already. Being my poetry and writings still unread I can't say I've been judged by the proper eyes but if so I firmly believe I would be nothing by deceived on the ground of my poor language and linguistic shortcomings.

It's difficult to try and understand language from the perspective of the linguist and from the perspective of the philologist and yet attempt to write a poem. One believes in everything that is writing as communication and acceptable form of language and even considers the musty scholarly literature a "dead matter". The other is simply devoted to slavishingly follow a text and in his eyes nothing in human hands produced can be compared to the splendor of other days, of other times.

The linguist and the philologist are trapped in cages of time, one way forward into the future and the other in a bygone past. Unlike Ari and Elliot their paths have never seemed to meet. They are based upon different conventionalisms. It's a struggle in which one despises the other. I believe I need far more knowledge to be able to write such a note, a better understanding of the Logos, less nicotine and far more investigation. My conclusion are very premature and neglect the opinion of others.

Even after Isobel's manifesto I can claim I'm no writer. Just a real persona pretending to be a writer. I might just be judging myself with extreme severity but I still can't write odes, I'm just at odds.

Isobel's manifesto

Isobel's manifesto

On the day before the Atonement I shall confess having desisted on the idea of being an artist, of being a tender soul. Wounded in the flesh by the miseries of a young soul I wander through a storm in which blank pages come twofold, and even when watched from above by the first-born sons of the Sun I might be allowed to remain in the night for there's where I belong. Shall I not be allowed by the limits of the Sun to step into the heights of the Olympus and shall I remain in companion of Persephone and other deities of the underworld for I have found my nest in a dark forest near the river of Stygia that surrounds and confines ninefold the gates of the underworld.

Midway the night of Lesbos and Arcadia shall not come the golden chariots of the morning and may I be granted a permanent dominion over the waters that surround my forest, mountain wolves and souls. May I perhaps rule over the volcano that rises before me and hides me from the inclement virtues of the sun. Shall this be granted I might swear loyalty to my creator god.

For I'm a daughter of the night and Demetrian warrior, shall I not see the face of the solar gods and might my face be covered by a mask of mud that will protect me from divine chores; shall I be slain in my mortal and vicious soul for from beyond the graves beneath my river I've risen and no interest in immortality I hold.

I desist from the glories of this world for no poet or wise man I behold, shall my companion in the Hades be my river, my forest and my wolf. Shall I not be separated from them for I bore them from my womb. To the kin of the heathen I belong, beneath the river I shall long.

Streaming

In the forest I hide
Through the forest I dive
Forlorn I die
A mountain wolf I ride

In herds I wander
Through the nature pander
For men should falter
In this world down and under

From thy haunt ye'e hunted
By the river wanted
Is the moon unchanted?
Was a lover granted?

Be thyself a thief
Be thy world a grief
Shalt thy womb believe
Tomorrow in brief



Justice

In the aftermath of a writer's death I was born
From beyond his grave I rose up in words
The dreadful motions of his words bore me to life
Just like a deity is born.

From the waters I rose
Before the morning shoved
In blank pages you deceived me
But from whence I came, I returned.

As a first-born of the tenth Muse I bore
I fed myself in my womb
I was invoked in your tomb
Of the sweetness of evil I became an encore.

From the heights of your breast
I stole your parent's tongue
Before they were laid to rest
I made with their flesh a song.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Hands clean - A Kitty's note

Alright, today (and actually these days) I'm a lot in a Kitty's notes mood, it will probably halt my way into the literary grandeur of Isobel and her readers but however I think that it's important for me to dig into myself a little bit here and there; not into myself as Hyperion's son, as Ari the philologist and predilect first-born of the Gods, but rather into myself as the simple being of flesh and bone who stares endlessly at this screen and puts thought into wordings. I'm also a real person who writes about self-contained realities, about non-fictious realities, those realities that only the very depths of the soul can explain.

You can't really write good poetry for a job, to sit between 6 and 9 to write stanzas and sonetos, poetry is rather an affliction than a job, a four-course meal for a teary starving soul. Poetry also comes out of the greatest joys and highest palaces of thought, the psychopathic personality of the poet whose colourful animations of long bygone characters turn him into the subject of his own despair. In every poet there's a little bit of a psychopath and so there is in every genious of our world. Geniality and pathos, although opposed by default constitute a musty companion, a natural rule whose components can't broken into particles.

The views of the world the poet holds turn him into a pitiable subject, into a signifier without being himself signified for the poet crawls on the irreparability of those phenomena he can see in colourful and vivid presentations without being able to let himself released from those chains, he's indeed uncanny. A poet is someone who must be able to understand different subjects and to infere timeless ideas from them. He must reckon his ideas don't belong particularly to him but the world of the ideas itself in which he's nothing but a mere player.

Behind the poet there's also a real persona, or if it suits you better, a dramatis persona. Since this is meant to be a Kitty's note with the charm that children's journals have we will not attempt to explain this subject any better, we would have to bring light out of the Aristotelian plot and vivify other divinities. We will only imply there's a real persona behind the mask of the writer. The terming of the words "mask" and "writer" can also produce some scornful remarks, for the writer is probably better unmasked and naked than any of his contemporaries, but it is so axiomatically evident that only a few can dare into this brutal touch of reality. That is only writer-inclusive, only the writer is unmasked; the real persona of the writer is probably better hidden and masked in the figure of the writer himself, not the writer for the sake of his writings but a writer for the sake of a writer.

There's a real me behind the writer, no one particularly fascinating. Just a normal guy living a less-than-average life, a Tel-Aviv resident who wanders down the streets in sun glasses and bottles of cola. I'm just anyone else, pretending to be just anyone else without much success though. Behind the persona of the writer the awareness of a morbid thought, the writer and his real persona are aware one of the other with tremendous despise. The real persona faces challenges that are unknown to the writer whose individual principles are very well known. I as a real persona fall in love, crawl into my feelings, grow up and despair, disdain and somehow I have the impression the writer is taking on me, slowly but surely taking on me.

Somehow I've come to understand to which extent it's meant to be that way, for the writer is a timeless self. He's not concerned about my own problems or sufferings because out of them he's pulling out what's already beyond the grave. In my own words the writer is letting my own life sleep away. There's a note called "The Death of the Writer" that will see the light over the next hours, there I'll explain how prone is the writer to die, more than me, the real persona, is. Yet the real persona is not as likely to be in the make out of history as the writer is.

Yesterday for example I attempted to write a childhood note about my relationship with the poet Rimbaud and I failed in doing so, not even the world of similarities and connections between the both of us that made of Rimbaud of one the idols of my childhood was sufficient to bridge the gaps between the writer and me; I felt ignorant and simply wordly but yet meaningless. I'm not the writer but merely the real persona, the writer and me also find one another in the shade, in the night, in pleasant wishful thinking. The writer is someone I even myself like, the real persona is a far less interesting universe. He's just one other victim of post-modernism. Yes I know, I owe you the note about the victims of post-modernism for more than a week already.

Let me see my life going to waste for a couple of hours more, writer and me have an appointment tonight, unless one of our readers comes to haste. As far as I'm concerned I intended to treat a totally different subject in a long Kitty's note (the title doesn't match the note at all) but it seems the writer doesn't like me writing about those uninteresting subjects, just like wife was annoyed at a simplistic childish talk. I see the writer is prone to die, but let him sleep away with the day, no major chances.

Same goes for wife, the house seems to be falling apart and not just the house but its dwellers. This blog requires urgently some female touch only hyper-sensuality can grant. Stability, security, those little things Jewish women for which Jewish women can always put an act.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Clinical morning, cynical morning

Well right after our elucidation of Isobel's particulars I decided to dose off without much success, a little while I dived into Kerenyi going no further than the introduction and full of fears I sank into my sleep, disturbed sleep with the strangest of dreams. Dreams of day to day life and working hours, very strange dreams to my taste.

To my surprise I woke up on time even after not picking up the phone for a couple of hours already; then I had to get ready even before having time for a morning note and headed towards the clinic; as my friend Arie is undergoing an operation this morning. Nothing really serious yet an operation. In my sick hallucinations I made use of the time in the hospital firstly to deceive an old friend of mine and royally slow down our relationship just because "he doesn't work for me", oh well it's been hard and even harder the days but I decided to dive into this irreparability and lock Ari back again into the shades where Isobel's meant to frame him, to protect him.

The morning surprise with a response from Lara which somehow I expected, the answer of my second reader hasn't come through and disacknowledging why I seem to pretend I don't expect it when certainly I do. I'm such a deceiving animal, a self deceiving animal. It's strange what Lara said for I find truth in her words, it's difficult to figure out how we've managed actually to build a friendship at all, but same would go for Keren which is an even more dramatic case of what a little woman is. I need a haircut by the way.

I'm still stranged in the come about of the last events of my life, a bit hidding and a bit running, a bit responding to life in the only way I was taught to; with a slaughtering passiveness even before the most sickening auguries. I don't seem to be any interested in the future for I can't really look into it right now and anyway I shouldn't, Ari is just twenty anyway and in shallow consumption he should dwell, yet he doesn't. But never mind, we really know him already so it wouldn't surprise us in the light of the latest findings. Yet he's still starved.

I'll use the rest of the day in the clinic to wander into Kerenyi despite the formal conventionalism, I should just follow Kaltisdou and Otto hence my starting point should be Hesiodus and not academically unchallenging Kerenyi. In anycase I'm heading towards the other direction, I'll start with Kerenyi and then shift into Hesiodus and later Homer. The grammar classes have been somehow neglected as well, but we'll catch up. There's so much I have to learn, if you could only see my imaginary list of selected readings. Just as if I were starting from the start all over again, but that's the fun of it. Now being already an educated philologist I can allow myself to pursue these readings at the slow pace of a philological rendez-vous. I just thought I maybe should resume my reading of Agnon's Shira; I don't really like the book but I find it interesting and the language very rich, I'm quite addicted to read those writers whose language I might find enriching, even so more than Elliot. Still I read only lonely writers, lonely writers that wrote probably for lonely readers. I find myself in both sides of the edge, how interesting!

I've got to write today a few political letters I've promised for more than a half a year and they're so meaningless that the waiting has been dragged for so long but at the same time my mind is on Arie's and the next meals. I'm not sure if I'll accomplish my purpose but I can say I'm going to decidedly try. I believe Isobel and Kerenyi are far more interesting but I should look after my own sake sometimes as well. They all do. I've got linguistic gift for those persuasions, so get down to work!

I was surprised also to find out that Lara actually has missed wife a little bit, hummm I think we all do, but still she's more of an historical character than a short period of my life so we'll have more time to talk about her, or even better to let her talk.

Isobel's particulars was also an interesting note, lacking the fulfilling taste of other notes but very concrete, I believe the readers will be very interested in Isobel's particulars, for now I can only promise to read a few Anglo-Saxon poems and try to define her better. My Icelandic is also going down the trail, something else to catch up with. Will this ever end? I doubt it.

Time to catch up with something more primary, an hour of sleep or maybe 45 minutes even. That'll do good to me, not to my political letters though.

Ari




Isobel's particulars

Well it's about time for some introduction. Where did Isobel come from?

Ok I might provide a few answers only. Isobel is actually the name of a wonderful song written and sung by Bjork included in the album Post (around 1995) and that is her second solo album in between Debut and Homogenic (although I think Homogenic is more "Isobel" than the Post itself in which Isobel might be an isolated song only making companion with the last two songs, "Cover me" and "Headphones", -to be continued). Isobel was the soundtrack of an anime movie. I'd never been really interested in anime or Japanese culture whatsoever but structural state-linguistics brought me closer to the Japanese culture (specially for semiotic reasons) than I ever thought I'd be.

Isobel was soundtrack of the movie called "Monokoke Hime" (Princess Monokoke) that was released about 1995 or 1996, while I was still in my innocent adolescence (just about to start with drugs to be more specific). The character of Isobel was named "San" in the movie but I rather stayed with the name "Isobel" which actually is a Germanization of a Hebrew name needless to say.

San was apparently a girl who was raised by a mountain wolf and who has an intense hatred for humans who invade the forest (hummmm.... don't start tilting up your heads at this point please for it gets betters). With a strange mask on her face and riding a huge mountain wolf, she repeatedly attacks the humans who have established an iron making place in her forest. It's told that after meeting "the guy" (or Ashitaka in the film) "her heart sways between the Gods and the humans".

I believe the entourage and idea itself of "San" is a very Nordic motif, and hence I've decided to take upon this sympathetic character for a theme. I must confess there've been several external motivations that led to this but the frame of the main original idea remains untouched. Although the movie is full of samurais and very anime-like ideas I still stress the very Nordic personality of San. She could be perfectly a Finnish characterization but for personal "raisons d'étre" I created my Isobel more as an Icelandic or purely polar figure. She must have been originally Icelandic and hence this language would constitute her mother tongue, or even better... the Old Norse we have been studying for sometime. I believe some further insight into Old English (and the old Anglo-Saxon culture itself), Modern Icelandic, Proto-Germanic and Classical Greek will bring us closer to the authentic nature of the Isobel I've pictured out.

Isobel must have been a Northern Icelandic character although it's very prone to be confused for the polar settings dispose us of the forestal milieu hence we shall take her back into a more Western Icelandic scenario. Still I don't pretend to say she must be settled down in Iceland but part of some Icelandic emmigration wave. The place in which this story takes place must be indeed somewhere in Finland, probably in the surroundings of Karelia, to be more specific Rovaniemi; the town that is separated by the Northern Pole and the Arctic Pole. I still lack of enough specific background to make a more detailed description of the conditions of the time but it should be overcome in due course of time. As a philologist I have a growing interest in the personality of Isobel as a highly cultured individual, self-didact and yet savage.

This must be it for now. More tomorrow. I'll provide a few links too.

Ari
Still in the Middle East


Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Are you a blog subscriber?

Hummm... this question should be actually an advertising slogan, and I'm no publicist therefore I'm not going to advertise anything, not even my blog. I'm going to talk about something totally uninteresting and empty, nothing to do with Isobel. I just want to talk about the readers of this blog and even when the note profiles to be not literarily enriching or for the same good sake interesting, I think the owner of this blog is oweing this note already for sometime. For it's far more important to talk about the readers of the blog than it is important to talk about the characters of the blog. The characters themselves might shift their sides and their encores, we've already noticed from words of the story-teller that most of them are nothing but stoppovers, odes and navigation maps in the life of Isobel and in regard to Isobel there's not much we can really know, for the mystery of her animal existence is the main concern of some series of writings included in this blog, understand Isobel is not a purpose but rather a process, a process that just like beauty or virtue is meant to be unfinished, is meant to be half-foretold, half-untold.

In my opinion there hasn't been that many people reading through these pages other than a few friends and other cronies; somehow it doesn't really make justice to the writer since many of our readers are themselves characters whose lives are vividly pictured here in the most absolute and radical abstractions, those kind of abstractions that probably can spring only from the hands of a linguist. Of a linguist who pretends to write journals, who pretends to write history, who pretends above all to be a simple blogger. Bottom line is, no justice is being made to the linguist.

The philologist is reading this blog with content, apparently he's been made the main and only purpose of this blog, but he's mistaken for he's only got to provide us with the background that would make this enriched language and elaborate discourse possible, the philologist is the one to provide us with the mustiness that is necessary to explain the lives and deers of Isobel, to explain the Isobelian tragedy with its riddles, poems and side dishes. The philologist provides with the content, he's a musty young man with context and background, a victim of the Isobelian frustrations. Cursed by the awareness granted to those softened by the arts of the muses and even by Sappho, the 10th muse as some Greek demagogist would say.

The wife of the journalist or at present simply wife was also one of our frequent readers, a critic of every word and every persona depicted here, the wife of the journalist with her little talk and acute moral understanding of other people and other dynamics was one of the most impressive features of our blogs, Ari and the wife of the journalist did manage actually to keep us entertained for a couple of weeks with their conflict and their bond. A triada between Sophoclean agonies, Victorian novels and Israeli newspapers. Together they walked the paths of wife's short life until the take over of Isobel one night of wild motions and animal breathe, when the primary instinct took over the infatuations of a rich woman and gave birth to the girl Isobel, to the woman Isobel, above all to the a more human and delicate Isobel. The wife of the journalist was a victim of post-modernism, a victim of gay American life, a victim of feminism and a victim of democracy. Even so, she read this blog. Since we're far to have completed the superstructure of this blog (and that will probably never happen) there're several future notes missing. The wife of the journalist doesn't need a biographical profile or a history of her own, there's a little bit of this little woman in each and every one of us, in every wife and in every big and strong husband. Only my notes about the victims of post-modernism (due to be published here) and some other desserts will explain the life of the wife of the journalist, the ageless "petit femme". There's something about her I truely liked, but we're not the same real persona. I don't need to regret her wrongdoings and her invasive suitcases in the journalist's life leaving Ari asides. We're just saying the wife was one of our most faithful readers.

They haven't been the only readers of this blog, there are others whose mention is definitely worthwhile. The journalist has read this blog as well but little can be told about him for there's a real persone behind the character of the journalist, a real persona about whom we'll talk by the end of this note. The journalist himself has allegedly been unnamed by Isobel. His name has become a Biblical metaphor that is outside the scope of this note. For now we shall just say Ofer is behind the note, in between the lines and hence we're indebted to him as well for this note, shall the whiskey not play up on me I'll be able to finish this note and comment the real person behind his title and what he's got to do with this note.

There have been other casual readers, other circumstancial and coincidential readers. People like Elliot has been also been reading this blog and making casual annotation about the elevated morality of our characters, our fogs and our screens of mist. Elliot has been also a passive player of this plot. Her friendship with wife has been a proof of her existence, of her circumstancial existence. How she brought herself along from centuries long gone by and spoke up her mind, in abscences, in silences.

Elliot hasn't been the only reader, there have been others whose names we're not meant to mention, there have been other odes and other poems. Dramatists, tragics, novelists and even simple story tellers, mythologic deities and people with little stories, people of little words, little people just like wife, little in their grandeur, rendez-vous.

We can count on other people as well. I have two sisters, not sisters in blood of heart but blood in arms, blood specially in arms. My sister Lola actually seems to be occupied with beatings and academic romances and anyhow she doesn't know the language good enough as to understand the leit-motifs behind this blog, despite the Kunderian letters we've exchanged over the last four years. Timeless but not meant to stay. I count with another sister, Keren, but unfortunately destiny has placed us with different standings and she hasn't been able to outreach me on such a level that would enable her to read this blog, hence she's just not reading it.

Then I have a broad circle of so-called friends, to whom I would refer as nothing but acquaintances for our communication is one-sided and we don't manage to hear each other's language in spite of speaking the same language. Language is not something that has to do with grammar, it probably has to do with Logos more than with anything else. I must be right here in the position to talk about Anne Frank, "who would believe that a thirteen years old girl feels alone in the world?". Who would believe that such a talented and overinfatuated blogger feels alone in the world? Well this blogger certainly does.

I have other friends who should be likely to read in this blog but still no mention has been made of them whatsoever. There's not many people in the world I trust for that purpose and between shades and soul Ari still constitutes an unreadable paper, a blank page in uncertainty of selfness. We can mention a few only for the good sake. Iris for example, my advisor and guide in different paths of life, the breed and breathe of motherhood in one friend, unconditional friend... yet she's too busy between morning vermouth and anti-depressant pills hence she's not very likely to stare at my blog. Friends that have come and gone in the missing, in the abscence and the yearning of other days... these friends haven't read here either, they haven't been read here either.

Many others constitute the core of passengers and different travel companions in the journey of Isobel through the hues of Indigo and ebano and jade. Childhood soulmates and adolescence soulmates that been lost on the way through the journeys of time that separate all things, that bring all things together like Hesperus, like Aurora. Despite all that we're not together in this life for Isobel has led very different lives. Thus they're not reading these pages and they're not very likely to do so in the future. They don't constitute the steady group of subscribers to this blog.

Strangers, unknown strangers and familiar strangers have also wandered down these pages, I've stranged them as well. Strangers that might just have come across these pages through a search enginge or just through scrolling down profiles in my site, maybe through my website, my fora or the different websites in which I've been writing for the last years which are quite a few. Strangers are the readers I like the most but I don't think I count with many of them for who would be really interested in the writings of a poor young philologist? Who would be interested in the stranged life of Isobel in the forest and in the peak and in the dawn?

Still I rely on strangers to keep the meaningfulness of these pages for the posterity, strangers have constituted in all times the best of readers and the most conscipicious and loyal followers, but I count with no such followers. If you're a stranger that just came across these pages and has the patience to come down here let me know who you are, not because I'm certainly interested in you as the selfish journal writer I am, but only in order to profile you for the record of my historial. Maybe one day notes about strangers will be written down here, just like I did years back during my years in college and university. All my notes were about strangers and about stranged.

The pale and sad guy and the flowers, the smells to old and to morrow, the mourn and the morning, the still smells, the smells then still, it still smells. Deja-vouz in the streets, the blonde guy with the leather jacket just next to the hotel's corner, Liad-looking girls and other categories of stars, other impersonal categorizations. That's what pleasurably I used to write back then in the days of my earlier youth.

My old lovers also fall in the category of stranged readers, of known unreaders. None of them has been invited to these pages for no one of them has ever got to know Isobel, none of them was curious enough to dig into the reality shades of Isobel and her moonly companion. Even after being simpe flirts, affairs or love stories they didn't find the way right through Isobel and very few yet have found it straight. My old lovers don't fall among these category of finders. They're not categoric readers, they constitute probably simple Hegelian and Proustian introductions to Isobel's thought, as if there was such a thing though. Heraclitus would help us to elucidate better; "If you've heard me but not the Logos, it is wise to ascertain by means of the sense that all things constitute one very thing". "Ta panda". My old lovers are as unfit to wander through these pages as the half-strangers of my phone agenda are. They don't reach the category of odes, they're stuck as simply rememebrances, not even memories.

Probably Fernando would be the most qualified reader but still he's not reading me, not because he lacks of the language or state of mind to do so. It's only because I'm still sitting on his pedestal among other Greek divinities I introduced to him in books of Jung and Kerenyi. This is not meant to be read by admirers, only by observers. He's not even stranged yet, only placed somewhere between nothingness and spaced conceptualizations. Hence he's not reading Isobel either, for in despite of being the closest of lovers and the most feeble and fervient of them, he hasn't seen Isobel yet. He was content with the distant reflexes of Ari from afar, of an Apolinear Ari that doesn't have place among tragic discourses and short poems. Not even the most loyal admirer of Ari has place among these pages for Isobel can't really tolerate, she's in the end living by herself, "when she does it she means to".

Does it mean we're simply unread? Hummm... not so sure about it. There are a few readers, very few and it's very much worthwhile to talk about them with a banal touch, with a touch not even Isobel herself would recognize.

There are probably only two readers I woud rely on but I'm prone to talk about them with a certain despise. I will refrain to do so though because who am I anyway to jump into conclusions? Who am I to draw up conclusions from Isobel's findings? She's probably known for longer than I do where she's being led to. Who am I to talk about her secret life and her private loves? I do relate to these two readers but my opinions are simply unfounded, because "one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do... one is a number just worse than two". I'm not Isobel, I'm simply Ari, the loneliest number. Ari the zweerver, a lonely number.

I might just talk a little bit about these two meant-to-be-loyal readers without going into detail for a lifetime and whole empty blog is meant to do this job. Unlike Isobel's, Ari and these two readers are enormous "muss-nicht-sein" that only adulthood and maturity will break from their unrest. Even when unnamed for Isobel those readers and eventually writers and self-contained writers do have a name for me and since I don't belong to Isobel's world I'm prone to comment on them. Simple flesh, simple bones, simple human kind. A couple of days back in time I pretended to make those two readers members of this blog but I withdrew in the last minute, they're meant to be readers and who could write about Isobel's life if not me? Yes I know it's just me being totally egoccentric, but let them make a choice. Let them spin. It's a chill out comedy. I wouldn't allow them to write in these pages as first person and I don't know if they're even interested in reading at all so I rather don't ask questions whose answers I'm afraid to foresee.

Ari and these two readers seem to lead parallel lives from different universal axes and theyr bridges although unbridged seem to have connected at some point.

Lara and Ari have been friends for already sometime and she seems to understand Isobel better than she understand Ari. She and Ari seem to lack a bit of a connection, a reality touch. Religious differences separate them, age separated them and not just age but thousands of miles and several oceans, several ships, nights and days. They haven't really outreached. Lara is more than the hilarious Anglo-Saxon woman from the tabooed Christian world, more than the kindergarden and the van, she's far beyond those little ephimerities. Ari is more than the average gay man, than little talk and post cards. More than weltschmerz and unrest. One still hasn't managed to see the other, they don't embrace and they don't seem to understand.

Lara and Isobel are something else. Lara doesn't know the world where Isobel lives although she's been already to Norway, but it's worthwhile remembering there's a world of hues and words between suburban Norway and the Isobelian nights, there's a world of differences between cosmopolitan Trondsheim and the Valhala. A world not even language can bridge. Yet they do seem to relate, they both seem to understand. Things that not language but skin can explain. Ari personally only partly likes Lara for she finds her temporarily deceiving and superficial, sometimes talkable and sometimes just filled up with the phony North American Europeans couldn't ever put up to, for these people has been nowhere beyond the Northern Sea, even when living in the Middle East they haven't left Vriesland and Ruegen. But Lara and Isobel are intimate friends, just like Elliot and wife. Lara constitutes one of the readers of our blog, one of those two readers we rely on.

Ofer and Ari are somewhere else, different planets standing on axes of the same galaxy yet distant as nothingness and selfness, distant as oxygen and decomposition. Ofer and Ari have just come out of a flirt, of a little story that never broke ground, of a little story that became a silent operetta, yet never breaking the ground, nor the waves. Ari and Ofer are not an ordinary companion but an extraordinary lack of it. An infatuated and overly smart and well spoken lack of companion. They're edges from different strings, unparallel wires. Walking together through a tempestful storm they've already parted for storms come in cycles and companion allows no repetition and American gay life allow no stronghold of sentimentalisms. Who's got time for humanity these days anyway? Ofer and Ari are heavy suitcases of "muss-nicht-sein", elaborate and overcomplicated misunderstandings. Also tons and tons of sadness, that sadness probably only Elliot and Isobel could understand.

Isobel and Ofer are nonetheless standing on a very different axe; Ofer is probably one of the only males with enough sensitivity to approach Isobel's delicate silent skin in between the lines, in between Ari's sadness and wife's overcomplicated speech and rehearsal. In the silences and in the inmortalities of blank poems Ofer and Isobel walked into each other's eyes every once in a while, and thus walked out too. He could smell Isobel the hunter, in her haunt. Isobel the animal killer, more than probably anyone else he could not just smell but also taste Isobel the animal killer, the wet smell to ground and animal beauty of Phoebus energetikos. A Demetrian unsung ode, an ode written in paper skin, in skinned paper.

The both of them and Isobel embrace in sweet brutality, in animal motions. The ones who could see her beautifully sad and angry face in between the clouds of smoke exhalling from the philologist's knowledge-starving mouth. Ari can walk on water no otherwise than by himself... Lara and Isobel, Ofer and Isobel.. they dance in the Aurora and walk on water together without letting go. Without freezing cold, unfinished and thrill-free, almost Biblical. From their different scopes they foresee what's inside the forest, a pitch dark, a spark. The bursting flame with a name, Isobel.

Without loving Isobel, without hating her... just wrapping her in motions, embracing her in delicate wishful thoughts, in pitiful prayers of bereavement and mourning that replace the irreparability of their uncanny foresight. Those are the ones who are meant to read Isobel, shall they not be Greeks but thereinafter read the Greeks and echoeing modernity. Wasteful modernity and North-American fate. Roman empires and armies being led astray, in canned thoughts.

These are the real personae who are unwillingly meant to read us, those who have sorrowfully crossed the boundaries of no man's land, who have sneaked in between philologists and novelist and outreached the untouchable forest's Isobel.

Ofer and Lara in their unwandering contemplating the wandering in Bacchants' theories, those who allow her silent crawling and demagogically encourage it, for they've understood there's no other possible way, withdrawing themselves from the symphony.

For Ofer and Lara, our only readers... this note is meant for. We aren't even certain whether they're factually reading us but on them we rely. Once upon a time I explained how love poems become mournings when unread, so let these poems become only mornings, only morrows instead of sorrows. Temporarily the journalist and the wife (not his wife, but Lara the wife) are the only subscribers of this blog and for the tragedy (in the Aristotelian plot) we need no more than two, hence here three hitherto we have.

Be unto them comfort altogether with Isobel.

The writer

PD: There might be a third reader, his name is Siggi and unheard of still but we can't count him yet for we don't know much about the Isobelian background. Reykjavik 101 will bring the answer, Kopavogurian breakfast and Akureyri midnight sun. Once into the future Isobel will reveal her realm, her steady home way up north. Then and only then he'll become our third reader, the guide for the other two into the native country and language of Isobel. In order to understand better we also need some note about Bjork Sigmundsdottir music, that shall come. "O Holy Roman Empire, you and whose army? You and your cronies? Will you take us on?".

I must confess this note was re-written for a first final version was erased by a technical failure and this final version was written right after a couple of jameson's and a long long chat on frustrations and lead-astray's. I'm satisfied with the result, I hope you're too.