Artificial Jews in the New Jerusalem
7/15/96
ARTIFICIAL JEWS IN THE NEW JERUSALEM
“A word is dead/When it is said,/Some say
“I say it just/Begins to live/That day.” --Emily Dickinson
I grew up in a heartland family---both parents descended from homesteaders, all my relatives from Nebraska. My father still owns the Nebraska homestead established by his great grandfather in 1854 outside of Omaha.
But I was born in Japan and spoke Japanese before I spoke English. I came to America, by way of San Francisco Bay, as an infant immigrant. In San Francisco, so my mother says, a doctor reached down my esophagus and removed a worm that I brought with me from Tokyo. In time, in Nebraska and Kansas, I forgot my Japanese and mistakenly came to believe that my mother tongue was English. At 5, I moved to Germany. When I returned to America 3 years later, I sailed into New York Harbor, an immigrant once again. I remember being warmly greeted by Liberty. America was mine and yet it wasn't. Everything was new and wonderful and my birthright and I was also haunted by my memories of the Iron Curtain, of the atomic cannon my dad commanded, of concentration camp survivors with numbers on their forearms, of Roman ruins and blasted pillboxes and cemeteries vast as wheatfields from two world wars and German dwarves and hunchbacks and the Bavarian castles of Mad King Ludwig and the bears of Berne, Switzerland. Soon I was in school, in Alamo Heights, San Antonio. Soon I was eyeing crawfish in the stream which ran through the Alamo. Soon I was riding a burro through the hills of Mexico, soon I was snapping a bullwhip in a motel outside of Monterrey. I was spying Sputnik through my grandfather's telescope. I was of America and not of America. I was All-American and not American at all. I was an Artificial Jew.
Jews are of the culture yet not of the culture. In fact, Jews often master the volk-kultur more thoroughly than those who originated it. For example, Bob Zimmerman-Dylan took folk music and kicked its ass and made something magical and contemporary and politically powerful of it. He took folk music out of its quaint museum case and handed it, in radioactive form, to pissed off middleclass babyboomer adolescents. Bob Dylan, a Jew from Minnesota: Bob Zimmerman, a young man both of the heartland and alienated from it.
The land was ours before we were the land's. Everyone who comes to America is a Wandering Jew. We come from somewhere else. We embrace and exploit our new home. We love it and hate it. Only the Indians are not Jews in America.
Only the Indians seem to always have been here. Only the Indians have been here so long they can't remember, in their racial memory, having been anywhere else.
Now we visitors have dispossessed the Indians and made Artificial Jews of them. There is an Indian Diaspora. They are strangers in their own homeland. They have fled their native hunting grounds and landed on Skid Row in Seattle, Los Angeles, Great Falls.
Those of Indian descent who come to North America from Latin America find themselves strangers in a strange land, and therefore, again, Artificial Jews. Who among us isn't a wanderer? Who among us isn't alienated from some part or all of his culture, his land, his community, his language, his government, his family? Even those of us who view ourselves as natives are unwitting Jews, if Jews are those who both are and are not landsmen, who are simultaneously at home and in exile, who speak fluently in tongues not their own, who obey and respect the laws even as they see them as impositions from Caesar.
We claim we live in The Promised Land even as we whine that The Promise has been broken. And we suspect there's a more promising land awaiting us, just over the horizon, and the next horizon, and the next. We wander in the Sinai, even as we wonder whether the Sinai is Israel's or the Pharoah's Land.
We have English, and then we have our true mother tongues. We learn one language in the classroom and another in the street and another at the dinner table and another from our gangs and another at the office and another in the barracks and another on the playing field and another in bed and another in Needle Park and another from the television. But which one is the one we can call our own?
Even if we speak all the tongues we learn with greater fluency than those we learn them from, with greater fluency than any one else speaks them, we know that there is a language of the soul which no one speaks but us, and we only manage to speak it stumblingly, stammeringly, stutteringly.
If I speak my mother tongue, then I don't do justice to my father. If I speak my father tongue, I don't do homage to my mother. If I speak the language of my gut, I don't do obeisance to the language of my brain. If I speak the language of the street, I slight the language of the bed. My brain is Balkanized. My psyche is a patchwork of alien tongues, warlords, each battling to hold sway over the whole.
All the parts of myself are Wandering Jews, never really at home in their own body. How do I decide which tongue to use to speak to strangers? I begin with lowest common denominators, lingua francas, and then I look for cues. I throw out hints, I make cultural references, I see which jokes my listener gets and which he/she doesn't. When my listener passes my initial security clearance, I risk a more specialized language on him, entrusting to him the secrets of my individualized self.
Sometimes I find myself wandering in the land of a new psyche, a new acquaintance. I may meet and grow intimate with a person who is a United Nations of culturally diverse influences, a bedlam of conflicting psychological vantages, a Babel of irreconcilable idioms, a Thirty Years War of anathematic religious and ethical credos. When I step within the borders of such a one, I may be caught up in a great civil conflict not of my own making. I may, before I realize what has happened, be conscripted to fight on one side of the other. I may suddenly find myself an infantryman in a Gettysburg of the mind, a mind not my own.
How did this happen? One moment, I was a peace loving visitor to a new personality, to a novel nation-of-one. The next, I'm carrying a banner at Pickett's Charge, and shot and shell are flying all about me, threatening to blow me limb from limb. Terrified, I come to my senses. I see that I have been sucked into someone else's psychological, or emotional, or cultural, maelstrom. This isn't my fight. I'm only here, for example, because I wanted to make love to this woman, marry her, make a home with her, make a future with her.
Now I'm in full flight, running off the battlefield, despite the curses of her officers, who call me coward and deserter and threaten to shoot me if the enemy doesn't do so first. But I've come to my senses. This is some other person's conflict, not mine. I foolishly wandered into the confines of a loved one's psyche, and now I'm trying to get out with my life.
I run and run and run, and finally find myself, panting and sweating, bullet holes in my hat and sleeves, outside the borders of the other. I feel for all my limbs. Miraculously, I'm all there. I consider, with a sting of humiliation, that moment when I turned tail and ran for my life.
Then a wave of outrage pours over me. How dare anyone else try to involve me in her psychological civil war! Doesn't she realize that her fight isn't mine? No! That's just it! She thought her fight was my fight because she didn't understand where my borders ended and hers began! And maybe I didn't, either. That's why I strayed inside her frontiers. She viewed me as a coward because I wouldn't fight her fight for her! Yet to the degree I got embroiled in her civil war, I exhausted myself in a no-win tarbaby and she despised me for being a dupe. In her heart of hearts she knew that only she can make war, or peace, within herself.
Safely outside the borders of her psyche, I see that I am once more the Artificial Jew, homeless and wandering, vowing "Next year in Jerusalem." This marriage of ours was to be my long-lost homeland. When I came to her, when I came in her, I flung myself up on the beach like a sea turtle who has wandered the oceans wide for untold years, and who has finally returned to its hatching place to mate and lay eggs and begin the cycle all over again.
Now I find that my home beach is Omaha Beach, and the great day of my homecoming is D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, and the enemy, my beloved, is raining fire down on me from every vantage point. I'm unarmed, because I came here to mate and lay eggs, not to fight. My beloved homes her smart missiles in on my heart. She knows not what she does. She cannot stop herself as she tries with all her might to knock me out.
That which I thought was a place of safety is the most dangerous place of all. Sadly, I turn tail and run before getting a chance to lay my eggs. Somehow I escape with my life. Again I wander the oceans wide, I, a sea turtle, an Artificial Jew, my belly gravid with eggs, with new life.
Where, I cry, is my homeland, my home beach, my Jerusalem? Inside my belly I hear my young, scratching in their leathery eggs. This isn't the way it was supposed to happen! I was supposed to return to my home beach, my Omaha Beach, dig a hole, lay the eggs, and let them develop under the heat of the summer sun. Instead, they have gestated inside me.
The home beach of my offspring is my body. I am my children's Old Jerusalem. I, who was born of egg layers, have evolved, in the course of my own lifetime, into something ovoviviparous. I hatch eggs within my own body and give live birth as do certain snakes and fishes.
I am a turtle who carries his home on his back. I am mother and father and Old Jerusalem to my children. But when they hatch and assume separate lives I must leave them to fend for themselves in the sea. I may as well be dead to them. And perhaps their hatching and birthing will literally, or at least literarily, kill me. I, who was their Jerusalem, am spent, am evacuated, am a husk of my former self.
My children make their oceanic exodus, looking for New Jerusalems. These children of mine, they are my words, they are living messages-in-bottles. They come from Jerusalem. When they are at their best, they are the words of my mother, my father, my brother, my grandmother, my great great grandfather. They are the words of the street, and the bed, and the book, and the dinner table, and the temple, and the nation. They are the words of the fields and the mountains and the rivers and the lakes and the birds and the animals and the trees and the lightning storms and the earthquakes and the stars and the sun and the moon. They are the words of day and night alike. They are the words of my gut and my heart and my brain. They are the words of my soul.
They are my words and they are not my words. They come from me and they come from something that came before me and something that will go on after I am dead. These words of mine which are not my words have lives of their own and they seek mates of their own, homes of their own, futures of their own. They go out into the world, and if they cannot find Jerusalem, then they will build a New Jerusalem.
If they cannot find anyone with whom to mate, then they will be both husband and wife, lover and beloved, mother and father. They will inseminate themselves.
If they cannot find a plot of land on which to build a home, then they will carry their roofs on their backs.
They will chafe under the legacy and language I have passed on to them even as they revel in it. These words of mine, these living messages-in-bottles, these ovoviviparous offspring, will rebel against themselves, sensing that what I have passed down to them enchains them even as it enchants them.
They may face a very long time of wandering in the wilderness, The Sinai, of swimming through Sargasso Seas. They may face the truth that they may die before they ever speak one true word of their own. Rather than speak in tongues which are alien to them, they may resolve to be silent. This vow of silence may reign for years.
Then, in the middle of the oceanic desert, the sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, hears a voice speaking in a language he has never heard. It is coming from his own mouth. It is not one of the thousand tongues he has mastered as he wandered the four quarters of the globe, as he drifted the Seven Seas. It is not the tongue which he inherited from me. It is not the tongue of Old Jerusalem. It is compounded of all those tongues. It is compounded of everything this sea turtle, this Artificial Jew, this child of mine, has ever learned.
The vow of silence lifts. At last, the voice of the turtle is heard in the land and the sea. It is the voice of everlasting peace. And war. Of love. And hate. This voice has never been heard before. It has always been heard. It speaks in a ancient language which is ever new minted. When it uses a word which is worn and familiar, it polishes that word and serves it surprisingly so that it looks and sounds completely new.
The sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, the Wandering Jew, is speaking the New Hebrew. This newly minted language becomes the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. In the New Jerusalem, all the sea turtles will find their home beaches. In the New Jerusalem, all the Artificial Jews will at last come into their own. In the New Jerusalem, all the Wandering Jews will at last come to rest in the center of the cosmos.
In the New Jerusalem, each citizen will speak his own tongue freely and bravely, and each word will be new and true, yet old and familiar. Each language will be special to its speaker, yet accessible to others, comprehensible to others. Each speaker will, at last, speak for himself. And in speaking for himself he will speak for everyone.
In the New Jerusalem, Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Moslems, atheists and agnostics, will embrace each other and the commonweal. Every citizen will carry and build the New Jerusalem wherever he or she goes. No longer will citizens battle over city blocks. They will know that they have within themselves the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. If they want more city, they will build it out of their truest selves. Wherever they are, there is the New Jerusalem. Wherever they are, there is home.
--FIN--
ARTIFICIAL JEWS IN THE NEW JERUSALEM
“A word is dead/When it is said,/Some say
“I say it just/Begins to live/That day.” --Emily Dickinson
I grew up in a heartland family---both parents descended from homesteaders, all my relatives from Nebraska. My father still owns the Nebraska homestead established by his great grandfather in 1854 outside of Omaha.
But I was born in Japan and spoke Japanese before I spoke English. I came to America, by way of San Francisco Bay, as an infant immigrant. In San Francisco, so my mother says, a doctor reached down my esophagus and removed a worm that I brought with me from Tokyo. In time, in Nebraska and Kansas, I forgot my Japanese and mistakenly came to believe that my mother tongue was English. At 5, I moved to Germany. When I returned to America 3 years later, I sailed into New York Harbor, an immigrant once again. I remember being warmly greeted by Liberty. America was mine and yet it wasn't. Everything was new and wonderful and my birthright and I was also haunted by my memories of the Iron Curtain, of the atomic cannon my dad commanded, of concentration camp survivors with numbers on their forearms, of Roman ruins and blasted pillboxes and cemeteries vast as wheatfields from two world wars and German dwarves and hunchbacks and the Bavarian castles of Mad King Ludwig and the bears of Berne, Switzerland. Soon I was in school, in Alamo Heights, San Antonio. Soon I was eyeing crawfish in the stream which ran through the Alamo. Soon I was riding a burro through the hills of Mexico, soon I was snapping a bullwhip in a motel outside of Monterrey. I was spying Sputnik through my grandfather's telescope. I was of America and not of America. I was All-American and not American at all. I was an Artificial Jew.
Jews are of the culture yet not of the culture. In fact, Jews often master the volk-kultur more thoroughly than those who originated it. For example, Bob Zimmerman-Dylan took folk music and kicked its ass and made something magical and contemporary and politically powerful of it. He took folk music out of its quaint museum case and handed it, in radioactive form, to pissed off middleclass babyboomer adolescents. Bob Dylan, a Jew from Minnesota: Bob Zimmerman, a young man both of the heartland and alienated from it.
The land was ours before we were the land's. Everyone who comes to America is a Wandering Jew. We come from somewhere else. We embrace and exploit our new home. We love it and hate it. Only the Indians are not Jews in America.
Only the Indians seem to always have been here. Only the Indians have been here so long they can't remember, in their racial memory, having been anywhere else.
Now we visitors have dispossessed the Indians and made Artificial Jews of them. There is an Indian Diaspora. They are strangers in their own homeland. They have fled their native hunting grounds and landed on Skid Row in Seattle, Los Angeles, Great Falls.
Those of Indian descent who come to North America from Latin America find themselves strangers in a strange land, and therefore, again, Artificial Jews. Who among us isn't a wanderer? Who among us isn't alienated from some part or all of his culture, his land, his community, his language, his government, his family? Even those of us who view ourselves as natives are unwitting Jews, if Jews are those who both are and are not landsmen, who are simultaneously at home and in exile, who speak fluently in tongues not their own, who obey and respect the laws even as they see them as impositions from Caesar.
We claim we live in The Promised Land even as we whine that The Promise has been broken. And we suspect there's a more promising land awaiting us, just over the horizon, and the next horizon, and the next. We wander in the Sinai, even as we wonder whether the Sinai is Israel's or the Pharoah's Land.
We have English, and then we have our true mother tongues. We learn one language in the classroom and another in the street and another at the dinner table and another from our gangs and another at the office and another in the barracks and another on the playing field and another in bed and another in Needle Park and another from the television. But which one is the one we can call our own?
Even if we speak all the tongues we learn with greater fluency than those we learn them from, with greater fluency than any one else speaks them, we know that there is a language of the soul which no one speaks but us, and we only manage to speak it stumblingly, stammeringly, stutteringly.
If I speak my mother tongue, then I don't do justice to my father. If I speak my father tongue, I don't do homage to my mother. If I speak the language of my gut, I don't do obeisance to the language of my brain. If I speak the language of the street, I slight the language of the bed. My brain is Balkanized. My psyche is a patchwork of alien tongues, warlords, each battling to hold sway over the whole.
All the parts of myself are Wandering Jews, never really at home in their own body. How do I decide which tongue to use to speak to strangers? I begin with lowest common denominators, lingua francas, and then I look for cues. I throw out hints, I make cultural references, I see which jokes my listener gets and which he/she doesn't. When my listener passes my initial security clearance, I risk a more specialized language on him, entrusting to him the secrets of my individualized self.
Sometimes I find myself wandering in the land of a new psyche, a new acquaintance. I may meet and grow intimate with a person who is a United Nations of culturally diverse influences, a bedlam of conflicting psychological vantages, a Babel of irreconcilable idioms, a Thirty Years War of anathematic religious and ethical credos. When I step within the borders of such a one, I may be caught up in a great civil conflict not of my own making. I may, before I realize what has happened, be conscripted to fight on one side of the other. I may suddenly find myself an infantryman in a Gettysburg of the mind, a mind not my own.
How did this happen? One moment, I was a peace loving visitor to a new personality, to a novel nation-of-one. The next, I'm carrying a banner at Pickett's Charge, and shot and shell are flying all about me, threatening to blow me limb from limb. Terrified, I come to my senses. I see that I have been sucked into someone else's psychological, or emotional, or cultural, maelstrom. This isn't my fight. I'm only here, for example, because I wanted to make love to this woman, marry her, make a home with her, make a future with her.
Now I'm in full flight, running off the battlefield, despite the curses of her officers, who call me coward and deserter and threaten to shoot me if the enemy doesn't do so first. But I've come to my senses. This is some other person's conflict, not mine. I foolishly wandered into the confines of a loved one's psyche, and now I'm trying to get out with my life.
I run and run and run, and finally find myself, panting and sweating, bullet holes in my hat and sleeves, outside the borders of the other. I feel for all my limbs. Miraculously, I'm all there. I consider, with a sting of humiliation, that moment when I turned tail and ran for my life.
Then a wave of outrage pours over me. How dare anyone else try to involve me in her psychological civil war! Doesn't she realize that her fight isn't mine? No! That's just it! She thought her fight was my fight because she didn't understand where my borders ended and hers began! And maybe I didn't, either. That's why I strayed inside her frontiers. She viewed me as a coward because I wouldn't fight her fight for her! Yet to the degree I got embroiled in her civil war, I exhausted myself in a no-win tarbaby and she despised me for being a dupe. In her heart of hearts she knew that only she can make war, or peace, within herself.
Safely outside the borders of her psyche, I see that I am once more the Artificial Jew, homeless and wandering, vowing "Next year in Jerusalem." This marriage of ours was to be my long-lost homeland. When I came to her, when I came in her, I flung myself up on the beach like a sea turtle who has wandered the oceans wide for untold years, and who has finally returned to its hatching place to mate and lay eggs and begin the cycle all over again.
Now I find that my home beach is Omaha Beach, and the great day of my homecoming is D-Day, the Normandy Invasion, and the enemy, my beloved, is raining fire down on me from every vantage point. I'm unarmed, because I came here to mate and lay eggs, not to fight. My beloved homes her smart missiles in on my heart. She knows not what she does. She cannot stop herself as she tries with all her might to knock me out.
That which I thought was a place of safety is the most dangerous place of all. Sadly, I turn tail and run before getting a chance to lay my eggs. Somehow I escape with my life. Again I wander the oceans wide, I, a sea turtle, an Artificial Jew, my belly gravid with eggs, with new life.
Where, I cry, is my homeland, my home beach, my Jerusalem? Inside my belly I hear my young, scratching in their leathery eggs. This isn't the way it was supposed to happen! I was supposed to return to my home beach, my Omaha Beach, dig a hole, lay the eggs, and let them develop under the heat of the summer sun. Instead, they have gestated inside me.
The home beach of my offspring is my body. I am my children's Old Jerusalem. I, who was born of egg layers, have evolved, in the course of my own lifetime, into something ovoviviparous. I hatch eggs within my own body and give live birth as do certain snakes and fishes.
I am a turtle who carries his home on his back. I am mother and father and Old Jerusalem to my children. But when they hatch and assume separate lives I must leave them to fend for themselves in the sea. I may as well be dead to them. And perhaps their hatching and birthing will literally, or at least literarily, kill me. I, who was their Jerusalem, am spent, am evacuated, am a husk of my former self.
My children make their oceanic exodus, looking for New Jerusalems. These children of mine, they are my words, they are living messages-in-bottles. They come from Jerusalem. When they are at their best, they are the words of my mother, my father, my brother, my grandmother, my great great grandfather. They are the words of the street, and the bed, and the book, and the dinner table, and the temple, and the nation. They are the words of the fields and the mountains and the rivers and the lakes and the birds and the animals and the trees and the lightning storms and the earthquakes and the stars and the sun and the moon. They are the words of day and night alike. They are the words of my gut and my heart and my brain. They are the words of my soul.
They are my words and they are not my words. They come from me and they come from something that came before me and something that will go on after I am dead. These words of mine which are not my words have lives of their own and they seek mates of their own, homes of their own, futures of their own. They go out into the world, and if they cannot find Jerusalem, then they will build a New Jerusalem.
If they cannot find anyone with whom to mate, then they will be both husband and wife, lover and beloved, mother and father. They will inseminate themselves.
If they cannot find a plot of land on which to build a home, then they will carry their roofs on their backs.
They will chafe under the legacy and language I have passed on to them even as they revel in it. These words of mine, these living messages-in-bottles, these ovoviviparous offspring, will rebel against themselves, sensing that what I have passed down to them enchains them even as it enchants them.
They may face a very long time of wandering in the wilderness, The Sinai, of swimming through Sargasso Seas. They may face the truth that they may die before they ever speak one true word of their own. Rather than speak in tongues which are alien to them, they may resolve to be silent. This vow of silence may reign for years.
Then, in the middle of the oceanic desert, the sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, hears a voice speaking in a language he has never heard. It is coming from his own mouth. It is not one of the thousand tongues he has mastered as he wandered the four quarters of the globe, as he drifted the Seven Seas. It is not the tongue which he inherited from me. It is not the tongue of Old Jerusalem. It is compounded of all those tongues. It is compounded of everything this sea turtle, this Artificial Jew, this child of mine, has ever learned.
The vow of silence lifts. At last, the voice of the turtle is heard in the land and the sea. It is the voice of everlasting peace. And war. Of love. And hate. This voice has never been heard before. It has always been heard. It speaks in a ancient language which is ever new minted. When it uses a word which is worn and familiar, it polishes that word and serves it surprisingly so that it looks and sounds completely new.
The sea turtle, the Artificial Jew, the Wandering Jew, is speaking the New Hebrew. This newly minted language becomes the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. In the New Jerusalem, all the sea turtles will find their home beaches. In the New Jerusalem, all the Artificial Jews will at last come into their own. In the New Jerusalem, all the Wandering Jews will at last come to rest in the center of the cosmos.
In the New Jerusalem, each citizen will speak his own tongue freely and bravely, and each word will be new and true, yet old and familiar. Each language will be special to its speaker, yet accessible to others, comprehensible to others. Each speaker will, at last, speak for himself. And in speaking for himself he will speak for everyone.
In the New Jerusalem, Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Moslems, atheists and agnostics, will embrace each other and the commonweal. Every citizen will carry and build the New Jerusalem wherever he or she goes. No longer will citizens battle over city blocks. They will know that they have within themselves the building blocks of the New Jerusalem. If they want more city, they will build it out of their truest selves. Wherever they are, there is the New Jerusalem. Wherever they are, there is home.
--FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:25 AM
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