Waltz with Bashir

My first date with Y. was on a Friday afternoon, Rothschild Avenue: I saw people drinking coffee and smoking, a teenagers' band, bicycles, unicycles, art for sale -- an epiphany of "normal everyday Israel" -- everything Jerusalem could never be. At the cafe in the center of the boulevard with the high stools, he showed me where they drew the first scene of *Waltz with Bashir*" - the nightmare scene where the snarling dogs come overturning the stools.

I know I'm a very belated movie critic, as the movie came out over a year ago, but in my defense I'll say I got to watch it with Y., who is an animator, and even drew a shot of the inside of the tank, and could point out how one of the girls dancing in the discotheque was a portrait of an animator who worked on the movie, and the unshaven man slouching across the Beirut street in flip flops was a portrait of his teacher at Betzalel Art School. The inside scoop.

Today on the bus I kept seeing the Tel Aviv street scenes disassociate as if they were drawn in my mind, and then back again to real. The way the ululating women of Sabra and Shatila suddenly turn from cartoon characters into real and then the movie stops. I was imagining how they had to simulate ululation for the movie, how they gathered them in a room together and said, "Scream like you mean it." But of course, the soundtrack was real women who were encountering the horror, not animations.

Circling around the evening: South Tel Aviv. The darkly knowing look on the face of a middle aged prostitute wearing a pretty ruffled mini-dress as I walk down Chelnov Street. I'm lying on the bed waiting for the movie to start, reading Y.'s copy of Frankenstein, which he tells me his father used to read to him when he visited him in military jail (Sorry Y.: maybe you shouldn't date a writer...) where he had gotten for refusing to serve and then writing about it for the paper.

Of course the movie is deeply disappointing in the way that it refuses responsibility. The main character's journey to understand his war experiences results in a kind of negative apotheosis: he blocked it out because he thought he was responsible, but in fact, he was only lifting the light fixtures. He wasn't involved in the massacre. He was there that day, yes, but the Israeli soldiers didn't really know what was going on, not the simple foot soldiers, not our young men.

And Ari Folman's beautifully lyrical memory of bathing naked in the sepia sea and stepping out into the refugee camp on the day of the massacre, buttoning up his khaki uniform, remains unexplained. The therapist friend in the movie says, "The sea is your fears, what's blocking you." Very unsatisfying. Since when is "the sea," fears? My Jungian friends would never agree to that. The therapist friend also says "'the camps' were in you way before Sabra and Shatila. Your parents were in the camps, right?" Also seems too easy to me.

Y. says the sea is the sea of tears from so much "shooting and crying" - which is the Hebrew expression for a kind of bleeding heart Israeli liberalism that takes pity on the soldiers who must commit the atrocities, without any sense of the context or ultimately the responsibility they bear. My boyfriend who suffered through his army service twenty years later seems like the bastard son of these left wing filmmakers smoking joints in Amsterdam, talking about the war in Lebanon, feeling helpless. All they want to do is make art for art's sake, or sell falafel to gullible Dutch health nuts, or be left alone. Y. says this movie is a kind of luxury of mourning and regret. We didn't really ccommit the massacre, but still look how sorry and traumatized we are. Today the Israeli army does much worse things and nobody regrets them.

I think the sea is something mysterious that Ari Folman couldn't really touch with his theories and fake therapists, but he could touch with his drawings: some further mystery in the experience of life and death, of soldiers emerging like babies from the amniotic sea and going off to kill. I can't put it into words either.

And me? I turn from animation too into the real and back into an animated figure. Girlfriend into me again in all my familiar unworded flesh, like some naked creature bathing in the sea, and back again to a nice girlfriend. I'm angry at Ari Folman for not taking responsibility, for not being a good father, but I know I'm playing the same games circling through my own dreams while terrible things are happening just outside the door.

Burning Napkins, Famous Poets

Today I found myself dreaming of the empty coasts of the Marin Headlands, the neon green forests of upstate New York where I did my artist's residency last summer, or even the big clear patch of sky above the BART parking lot outside my house in Berkeley. Friday I escaped Jerusalem with a plastic bag full of wet laundry as the commune near my parents' house was having an afternoon trance party that was making the walls shake. The Indian woman in the purple sari dug her knees into my back on the shared taxi, and Tel Aviv is exploding with people.
The older ones are promenading on the beach boardwalk and eating fish dinners all night long, the pre-teens are finding dark corners on the deserted orthodox separate bathing enclosure, and clumps of hipsters with shiny minidresses and slicked back hair are congregating in Florentin, their cars parked haphazardly around the dumpsters, their table candles setting fire to napkins.

At the rooftop restaurant/bar our table spilled over into the next table. The blond girl asked us, "How old are you? Did you all go to the same class? Guess how old I am?"

And it's Hebrew Book Week, so I dragged myself off with the rest of the crowds to Rabin Square for a good deal on poetry, or maybe a new concordance. When I pushed my way to the front and asked about the two-for-one books I realized that I had been speaking to Natan Zach himself, one of Israel's handful of famous living poets, if not the most. Crowds and space. No artist's residency for him tonight. Or maybe ever. Poets here don't have the license to go off into the silence: they're in the crowded sticky city like everyone else, full of gossip and terrible interconnection. Even the Hebrew poems themselves I'm reading this week seem crowded - all this intertextuality! So much crowding from Bible and Midrash and Bialik etc. etc.! It's so crowded here on the page.

Outside Y.'s bedroom window, the Filipino boys are blowing bubbles. I can hear their delighted tones as if they were right here in the room with me, and I don't remember the last time I heard silence.

An Odd Assortment & A Personal Request

Dear kind and patient readers,
Instead of a long posting, here's a few notes from my Israelian week. Read them in order or choose your own adventure.

1. On Friday night we discussed ritual bathing over dinner. You learn so much about cultures through their bathing. Japanese baths, Turkish hammams. Etc. This is one of my set/pet subjects. Jews, I said, had ritual baths, but what about Israelis? G. said the Golan heights were full of springs that had been built up with rocks and plants as memorials for people killed, I think mostly in the army or terrorist attacks. Friends come and build the rocks around the spring together, then hikers go and bathe in them.

2. Still chewing on my inability to go to Hebron to see the occupation for myself, or go to a checkpoint to bear witness, and generally take part in political activity here. Is it because I'm lazy, scared, need more time to get into things here before jumping in?

3. Instead of going to Hebron I...went to eat at El Babur, maybe the best Palestinian resteraunt right outside of Um El Fahem in the Galillee and had tiny grape leaves. You could taste the tang of the grape leaf, not all the stuffed pointless white rice getting in the way of the tree.

4. Instead of going to Hebron I...drove with my father from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv at sunset the Northen Way, i.e. through the West Bank, both sides of the road often blocked off by a high cement wall. We agreed to disagree: (Arab)terrorism and the apartheid-state were a chicken and egg question. He told me about a Shabbat he spent in Hebron in 1969 with settlers who seemed very idealistic, very non-materialistic. Everything was less clear cut back then, he said.

5. Instead of going to Hebron I...begged and begged Naama to write in this blog about her trip to Hebron and her witnessing activities. I'm like the child that doesn't know what to ask, but I want to know what was it like there today, this city that is so close and so far away? What did it smell like? Was anyone happy to see you? Grateful? What do you do with what is witnessed - pass it like a hot potato from hand to hand quickly so it doesn't burn you?

6. There are more things I want to say about studying the prophets in Jerusalem and not in Berkeley, broken pots as signs of destruction, the Brutal Architechture of Hebrew University where this takes place -- but I'll save this for now and hope the computer Gods stay with me at least until the next few posts.

(P.S. Family vacation at the Sea of Galilee. A family friend recommends the Pilgerhaus, a German-Christian hotel, because Christianity is so relaxing. Later I hear a friend of a friend went psychotic on *her* family vacation.)