Love and Darkness

The war between Hamas and Israel is ongoing at the moment, with the poor Palestinians stuck in the middle and Israel and the Jews blamed for all their pain. Anti-Semitism re-emerges from hidden places, a smile on its ugly face.

Amos Oz is a good companion in these times, because he writes about the pain and the worry of loving. I have re-read his A Tale of Love and Darkness slowly, during these terrible days.

I must get hold of the book in Hebrew. Time and again I found myself translating the English words into Hebrew, recognising a Biblical lilt or a Zionist tune. Nicholas de Lange is an excellent translator, but still.

Amos Oz repeats himself. Some repeating feels true, as when he hears the bird singing the first five notes of Beethoven's Fuer Elise; at other times the recurrence seems laboured. Has the book been written according to a cyclical structure, where the same things the same people and similar situations keep returning, as in real life, faster and faster as we grow older, and we are given (by whom?) a chance to consider them from different points of view?

Much to do with language, its roots and the directions they take, a family obsession.

One section I loved: on p. 24, as a child of six he is taught 'the facts of life' by his father - how to arrange books on a bookcase - their backs to the world and facing the wall (the way Zen practitioners meditate).
He arranged them according to size, to his father's dismay. His father listed many different ways in which books might be arranged: those were the facts of life - diversity!

I found that portion thrilling. As a child, Amos Oz did not yearn to become a writer, but to become a book, which may never be completely destroyed, but a copy of which will survive in a bookshop somewhere; I think of the antiquarian bookshop Quilter's, here in Wellington, which is the kind of bookshop where his books can be found.

The End of the Land?

I've read David Grossman in the past - not always easily: literature, not entertainment.

Again a book about ending, about life and death.

I was given his latest book,To The End of the Land, in a small paperback edition, with a flowery cover, poppies, I think, a cheerful red. Then I spotted the book elsewhere, in the Jonathan Cape edition. It is larger, easier to read. On the black and white cover, a deep window-less aperture in a stone wall - an abandoned Arab house on the Golan Heights ? - frames the small silhouettes of a couple, a man and a woman, seen against a white sky. I bought that book, traded the other one in.


I can understand the flowers, but not forgive them. I noticed the same kitchiness on the cover of Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness: the copy I'd bought showed a young boy reclining in a field with a book, in a golden glow. As if the illustrator had been told - 'Reminiscences of boyhood' - and nothing else. Friends owned a hard-cover version by a different publisher, with a dull photo of a young boy walking by peeling walls in a city, the photo carrying a sense of menace. Much better. My copy has disappeared, someone has not returned it - I don't mind. As time passed, it offended me more and more.

In this book, the wild flowers are described exactly as the couple wander through the Galilee - the way an Israeli nature-lover would describe them. Of course the woman is a nature-lover, as well as being in Flight from a Message - (the Hebrew title).

I once worked with a client like this woman: from a war-torn country, she had somehow been exported here as a refugee, her two daughters remaining behind with her husband and his second wife. She was as they say, 'beside herself' with worry about the girls, spent her days in ceaseless walking over the hills around our town, tortured by terror about their fate, irritable and angry. In this book, Ora feels she has to leave in order to avoid/to prevent the death of her younger son. (My clients' daughters arrived safely after many months of anguish).

I've read several reviews of this book - one by a Patricia somebody, is a litany of complaints because she does not understand the culture in which the author is writing. Indeed for a non-Israeli, some work will be required - but then, Wikipedia is at your fingertips and most of the code words - names of villages, names of people - will be listed. For anyone with an Israeli connection, this book is very clear.

For those who carry Israel in their heart, the book is also painful. For I believe that when he calls it To The End of the Land, the author is showing how this may lead to the end of the dream - can Israel survive these losses?

Despite visiting Israel recently, I find that I now understood Israeli reality differently. For instance, why my brother-in-law was not keen to eat in a restaurant. The atmosphere of fear generated by suicide bombers. The soldiers' pitilessness. The Arabs' hatred. The desperate, frantic way many people live.


Some reviewers say that Ora's life appears overly narrow; I would disagree: this is what happens in moments of crisis - the only people who matter are those to whom you are very close.

Grossman does a wonderful job portraying Ora's feelings, though maybe he does go on for a little too long. The writer Avram comes to life - Ora's husband Ilan less so. There are moments which remain in the mind - the four-year old who learns about meat, the Palestinians in the school at night, and the scenes on the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War. I admire the way he unwraps the story little by little, giving hints and clues and allowing links to emerge gradually, as in real life. It is satisfying to experience.

I think that this book will endure and gain weight, as time goes on and its prophetic voice emerges more strongly.

David Grossman speaks about this book here.

More Oz

Here is the quote, from p. 99, (in Don't Call it Night, by Amos Oz, 2004, Chatto & Windus):

..A girl or a young woman would come in the night to share his hammock, bringing huge earthenware cups of coffee from somewhere for them both. Past and future appeared to him on such nights as two common diseases, slow, destructive plagues that had infected most of mankind and were gradually causing all sorts of strange frenzies in their victims. And he rejoiced that he was not afflicted, and considered himself immune...

I had forgotten that he mentions it in the context of sex. It makes sense there, but in a limited sort of way - unless of course the sex is a metaphor for life...

Here's another noticing: the quote extends from the last line of page 99 to the first line of page 100. The last numbered page - including the list of characters - is page 200. This puts the quote at the heart of the book. The book is divided into chapters without any numbering, so I counted - it is in the middle of chapter 15, though there are only 26 chapters in all. Fifteen in Hebrew is yod he, one of God's many pronounceable names: since numbers are represented by letters, one can 'read' them. (This sort of play is common in the Bible, and in Kabbalistic and Judaic literature.)

Just in case you find this is far-fetched: the character's name is Theo.
And here is a link (http://www.times.com/books/97/10/26/home/oz-callitnight.html) to a review in the New York Times, entitled God is in the details...
Worked on the Chinese Olympics poem: two versions - one with long lines, one with short ones. Shall wait for a day or maybe a week, before showing it to anyone.

Added much later:
Re the Hungarian cantor who was in the book for no apparent reason. I found the following reference in Wikipedia, when looking up Bloomsday in Dublin:
Bloomsday has also been celebrated since 1994 in the Hungarian town of Szombathely, the fictional birthplace of Leopold Bloom's father, Virág Rudolf, an emigrant Hungarian Jew. The event is usually centered on the Iseum, the remnants of an Isis temple from Roman times, and the Blum-mansion, commemorated to Joyce since 1997, at 40–41 Fő street, which used to be the property of an actual Jewish family called Blum. Hungarian author László Najmányi in his 2007 novel, The Mystery of the Blum-mansion (A Blum-ház rejtélye) describes the results of his research on the connection between Joyce and the Blum family.

Hungarian cantor?

Various commitments all suddenly need input at the same time, nothing can be put off; my brain veers off in several directions, thoughts incoherent, and not a word written since the poem about the Olympics. Today found my cellphone and my watch again. Misplacing them is always a sign.

Read Amos Oz as if meeting him for the first time - Don't call it night (Chatto & Windus, 2004 - Al tagidi laila) only $12,- hardback copy from Quilters' on Lambton Quay - not a second-hand book shop, an Antiquarian bookshop. Heaps of poetry books.




Back to Amos Oz: here's a question - the novel ended too soon for me, so read what was on the next page, curiously, a list of the novel's characters, like in a play, including near the end "Hungarian Cantor".

I can't remember a cantor of any kind in this book- did Oz just pop him in the list to keep things interesting?

Needing to read more Oz, took The Same Sea (Vintage, 2001, Oto HaYam) from my shelf: what I thought of as my copy turns out to belong to a friend.(I feel guilty, but I'll read it again first.)

The format of The Same Sea is different from usual novels: chapters often only a page long or less, prose poems, non-prose poems, lots of work for the reader, satisfying though at times obscure, not to say impossible to understand. ( I'd wish I had a Hebrew version, to read them side by side). The excellent translation by Nicholas de Lange, as usual.

Perceived recurring themes: the impossibility of truly knowing anyone else however close, the great suffering caused by love, and as part of the canvas he paints on, ordinary people grieving losses incurred in the Conflict.

In Don't call it night, he writes a wonderful sentence - about people's obsession with the past and the future, how they shouldn't. I'll re-read that book, find the sentence for posting here, and check about the cantor.

In praise of Imagists

This may be the longest interval between postings so far, except when I was away. The e-course porfolio was posted yesterday, and am reasonably happy with it. It's tidy, an occasion to review/rediscover poems.

Rilke is giving me indigestion, like a rich meal, his elegies too romantic. Tried reading some of his letters. I think that what gets in the way is that nothing is ordinary for him. Here's an example from a letter (p. 9 of Letters on Cezanne, 1985, Fromm International Publishing Company, NY): it starts with :

Never have I been so touched and almost gripped by the sight of heather...

I want to cut out the Never, (just as I tend to recoil from the word always). His only excuse is that he is writing to his wife (about sprigs of heather she sent him). A few lines later: But how glorious it is, this fragrance. The tone remains at full pitch, blaring.

However: in the introduction (by H.W. Petzet), there is a story about Cezanne (p. xxiii)

"...the ancient enmity between life and the great work (as Rilke put it in his Requiem) endured by the artist with such exemplary devotion: [...] during the last thirty years of his life, he removed himself from everything that could 'hook him' (the expression is Cezanne's) and when, for all his tradition-bound and believing Catholicism, he stayed away from his mother's funeral in order not to lose a day's work. '

Rilke adds: "That pierced me like an arrow... (and he can't leave it at that) ...like a flaming arrow".
[...] Cezanne's example revealed to Rilke his own existential conflict. He began to realise that his life must utterly belong to his work, and that he must never again be "delighted and awed" - as it says in his 'Testament' - except by his work."

Scary focus.

I should not be so denigrating of Rilke. I still have to find out what he actually wants to say. It is my loss, for the mean time. Maybe I'll find some way of reading him; shall see if I can find a commentary that speaks to me. The introduction by Robert Hass (in the book of poems) made my eyes glaze over.

Maybe it's tiredness, because turning to the second book of Coetzee's essays, (Stranger Shores, Literary essays, 1986-1999, published by Viking in 2001) and reading one on Amos Oz and one on Harry Mulisch, both authors whom I know, it was also an effort. After midnight, maybe not a good time. He also wrote an essay on Borges, we were discussing him in class the other day.

Read more of Yehuda Amichai's 1967 poems. Since writing a review of his work for the course, I read them with ease and a new feeling, of being spoken to directly. Always this requirement to go deeper.

I should probably write a review of Rilke.

Started on Viv's Imagist portfolio: I had never heard of the Imagists before, it is a similar turning away from florid-ness that happened in the other arts and in other languages. Could it be thought of as 'modern'? Bauhaus versus Baroque, for instance. I remember my father: "If a feature has no function, it has no place in the building".

In poetry, if the word does no work, take it out.
Thanks Viv.

A villanelle is due for Thursday. A villainous villanelle. Already, a favourite among those Hine gave us to read is The Art of Losing, by Elizabeth Bishop . The language is simple - here is an excerpt:

The art of losing isn't hard to master
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

The end of the poem is poignant.

Maybe I'll find her in the library.