Who are you?

     - Nardwuar the Human Serviette

I am the LORD thy God,

which have brought thee out

of the land of Egypt, out

of the house of bondage.

Exodus 20:2

Music videos are my generation’s Gesamtkunstwerk. America put a man on the moon in ‘69, but it was the clip of an astronaut planting an MTV flag through moondust that lured young imaginations into the zero-gravity phantasmagorical world of music videos where superstars moonwalked, vogued, and sang in choreographed scenes strung together through ever-inflating budgets, which forevermore changed the music and entertainment industries. Growing up on the edge of suburbia, I downed videos from MuchMusic as if the tv were a bucket of water and I had just gotten back from a day in the desert. “Gluten gleeben globin globin,” began Def Leppard's cobbled together “Rock of Ages,” a sort of speaking in tongues that announced a new gospel. Over the following decades, aspiring movie directors would cut their teeth on music videos (in “Praise You” Spike Jonze showed that with very little dosh you could dish up memorable goofing around), but it’s Janet and Michael Jackson in a spacecraft flying over the moon in the sci-fi morphing epic “Scream” that at $7 million in 1995 still holds the record for the most expensive video ever made. In the 90s and beyond, music videos were imagined as total artworks piped first into homes through a box in the living room and then into ever smaller screens nestled in the palm of a hand.

Tweet.     

After I put out a call on twitter asking for any recordings of how to learn alphabets, abjads and/or syllabaries, Gary Barwin, a multi-everything writer/artist from Hamilton, Ontario (author of Yiddish for Pirates) replied with a link to a music video by Victoria Hanna that, in its spiraling employment of all sorts of music video trickery, soared straight into my 80s/90s heart. “The Aleph-bet song (Hosha'ana)” begins with Hanna as a school teacher leading her students in a chant of “Alef, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, He, Vav, Zayin…” Each of these letters is accompanied by a gesture that hints in some way at the letter’s shape. For shin, Hanna raises both of her arms and her upper body suggests the three rising points of the letter: ש. (In another another galaxy far, far away Leonard Nemoy cites this letter as the inspiration behind the vulcan gesture for peace.) Hanna’s video begins playfully and then the song kicks in, and through quick-cut edits, mesmerizing choreography, and a catchy tune, we’re enticed into literacy. '

[Press the double-arrowed rewind button on the VCR to replay the above paragraph or put in another tape for a side story that chronicles the history of the Yiddish typewriter, first produced in 1903. “The Remington typewriter is now and has always been the recognized leader among typewriters. The new Remington equipped with Yiddish type is the latest form of this world-famous machine.”]

While the Phonecians were the first to fashion a system of letters from Egyptian hieroglyphs, its further development into Hebrew found a form in twenty-two letters that has endured diasporas, pogroms, and genocide. Today, Hebrew is used by the eight million residents of Israel and a million other people in dozens of different ethnolects, communities of speakers held together with what Ben-Sasson calls a “continuing Jewish consciousness and identity” (727). With some serious “Let’s get physical” stretching of the imagination, one might say that the way video-tapes allowed you to record your favourite music videos in the 80s is loosely analogous to how the Hebrew letters have held the earliest stories of the Jewish people:

                                                                 בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ

 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and earth.” Admittedly, a little ho-hum in its obviousness, but the second verse is where the plot thickens and twists: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”

[Turn the page.]

Around the age of ten, desperate for something to both understand and believe, I started reading the Bible from the beginning but, like the Jews, I too would get lost in the desert or drift off through the genealogical begats until some persnicketiness inside me demanded that I start from Genesis 1:1 again. Every Sunday morning at Green Timbers, three-quarters of the way through the service, the youngest members of the congregation would go off to children’s church where songs and games awaited them while the rest of us sat through a sermon by Pastor Joe or Pastor Wally. I opened my NIV Bible and tried to once again plough my way through Genesis or whatever other part of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) I’d made it to. Impatiently, I wanted to bypass the interpretations offered from the pulpit and get to goods myself. The contradiction within the very first two verses - there was nothing and then suddenly God’s hovercrafting over water - was something that I glossed over perhaps because I didn’t yet dare question the literal truth of the Holy Bible or maybe my reading skills weren’t up to snuff. Now, when I reread it, I can only liken it to a music video made by two directors with opposing visions.

Cut!

In point of fact, what might be behind this textual tangle are two world-views. In 1849, the discovery of clay fragments holding a Babylonian creation myth resuscitated Tiamet, the ancient goddess of the sea who also represented the chaos before creation. Kicking off thousands of years of patriarchy, the Bible begins with a man usurping the power of a woman. If Tiamet were on twitter, she would have most recently had her #metoo moment. In parallel fashion, I think Bananarama theorized it best in their 1986 video “Venus,” where a goddess “burning like a silver flame” becomes a devil once Christianity takes over. From the view of rabbis and Jewish scholars, who have created and responded to thousands of years of critical and creative scholarship, this textual awkwardness has been addressed. The medieval rabbi Rashi admitted, ‘it is written, (v. 2) “The Spirit of God was hovering on the face of the waters,” and Scripture had not yet disclosed when the creation of the waters took place — consequently you must learn from this that the creation of the waters preceded that of the earth.’ Reasonable. As opposed to the straightforward exclamations and strained explanations of faith in many Christian traditions, there’s a long history of Jewish critical commentary written marginally to illuminate other commentary written in blocks next to the actual text of the Torah. This gloss begat that gloss and so on and so forth as scripture is schlepped along.

“Are you sure you’re not Jewish?” Rhea Tregebov, my thesis advisor at UBC, asked after I’d expressed some needling anxiety over a line in my manuscript of poetry, a collection which would become my second full-length book, Ignite. Rhea was kidding of course, but at a young age I sure did take the Old Testament at face value. We were all earnestly singing our way into another tradition: “Father Abraham had many sons, many sons had Father Abraham. I am one of them and so are you. So let’s all praise the Lord.” Was this a bid at elbowing our way past those other chosen people? The Jews had indeed brought us Jesus, the Apostles, and Paul, but what had they done for us lately? It wasn’t bupkis. Outside of church, I was learning serious buffoonery from the first video-tapes my friends and I were renting: Mel Brooks (History of the World Part 1) and Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker (Airplane!). But the apex of gags and absurdity came in a more traditional print form from “the gang of usual idiots” at MAD magazine. Next to my bed were my Bible and a stack of second-hand MADs from the 70s and 80s, both sources of literature heavily inflected (though I didn’t fully know it at the time) with a certain je ne sais... shpitz? In an interview on NPR, “Weird Al” Yankovic acknowledged that “Mad Magazine was there first to make me weird,” and his “Pretty Fly for a Rabi” might be an offering to his parodic progenitors.

Or it could be cultural appropriation.

Take two!

How do we participate meaningfully and respectfully to traditions that are not our own, but have still profoundly influenced us? Can there be a protocol for when fringes meet for the first time? Also, more problematically, what if those “traditions” involve questioning or upturning traditions? Is it enough for me to say that in the backwaters of my brain, on some abandoned raft of youth, MAD type marginalia is scrawled like Talmudic commentary around Biblical text that surrounds a holy of holies one-liner: 

What me worry?

I’m not Jewish after all and so while I do quibble with my own anxieties and insecurities (and rely on humour from time to time to release the pressure (“and who doesn’t?” I think though I wonder if that overgeneralizes things)), I have never experienced antisemitism, something that Canadian author Alex Leslie writes “is in the smallest gestures, the absent gestures” (128). Leslie writes this in an essay about a trip to Eastern Europe where she visits “hollowed out containers of former Jewish worlds and their current incarnations of museums, galleries, monuments” (121). The fact that Christianity emerged out of Judaism was a genealogy which never sat right with a great many Christians, and that unsettling dissonance was unleashed leathly in pogroms and other forms of persecution that struck Jewish communities over the millenia with ever increasing brutality, and who can tally the extent and range of Jewish responses in film, music, fiction and other forms of literature and art? Who knows how many stopped responding altogether? “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1949, a year after the founding of the State of Israel. Decades later, in "Jews in the Land of Israel," Yehuda Amichai wrote “Spilled blood is not the roots of trees / but it's the closest thing to roots /we have.” To my mind, Alex Leslie’s essay “Neon Museum,” which ponders presence and absence, synthesizes some of this tension in a description of a former Jewish neighborhood in Poland: “There is a plaque commemorating the former site of the home where the seer, the Jewish mystic, used to live. The plaque’s translation sounds like surrealism: Here is the non-existent house of the Seer” (126).                                                                                                                                                               שָׁלוֹם                                                                       

Here is a traditional fable that might have been told inside that house: in the beginning, all the letters came before the Lord and explained why they should be the first in the Torah, but the Aleph was silent. Afterwards, the Lord asked the אָלֶף why it hadn’t said anything. “I’m silent and therefore have nothing,” the vowel replied. Impressed with its humility, God gave it pride of place in the aleph-bet and in the ten commandments. The Hebrew word aluph itself means champion or master: אלוף To the envy of English, Hebrew is permeated to the letter with parables, fables, history, hermeneutics, and meanings.

[Consult your owner’s manual for repair instructions.]    

Differing from English in other more prosaic ways, Hebrew runs from right to left and sometimes the letters take diacritical marks (slashes, lines, and dots above or below the letters), but sometimes the marks are left out when it’s clear what the word is from the context. The conventions of left, right; up, down; video-tape, letter; book, VCR; poem, music video are the parameters through which we see the multitude of ways individuals and groups approach the world. Gary Barwin’s Yiddish for Pirates, manifestly meshuggeneh, takes as its backdrop the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The novel is narrated by a parrot with an attitude: “I may be meshugeh crazy, but I know from words. You think I’m a fool shmegegge? I’m all words” (5). This first line might be alluding to a certain Kabbalistic belief that it was the letters of the Hebrew language that were the building blocks of the world. In Genesis, Adam is composed of spirit א and blood (dam, דם) and Eve, who is brought to life through the breath of God, means breath: חַוָּה. Adam and Eve are a sort of literary creation of God. Back to Barwin: “A story is a great city, and words are its citizens, jostling and kibitzing in its busy streets. It’s the words that tell the tale, not the parrot. But it’s also marbeh dvorim, marbeh shtus, the more words, the more foolishness” (182).

Not to mention the more letters and languages and mouths . . .   

“You would make a perfect Nazi,” the casting agent said after I stepped into her office to meet her for the first time. I was in my late twenties and having landed the role of Brother Martin Ladvenu in a professional production of Saint Joan, I was now looking for work in television and film. This was an agency I would not return to. The sensitive flower sheltered at the base of my post-Mennonite pacifist heart had wilted at the sound of being compared to a Nazi. פרח is flower in Hebrew, which in its pronunciation PEH-rahkh, brings to my mind a bud blooming with its stamen rattling within the petals. After some colour returned to my heart, I found an agent and one of my first gigs was an extra on an Oasis video loosely based on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Against my better judgement, I spent three weekends playing a patient at the closed-down institution where my father had been incarcerated for mental illness in 1954. I hadn’t liked the little that I saw of “Hollywood North” and these weekends of awkwardness at what was once the Provincial Lunatic Asylum suggested I redirect my creative energies elsewhere.

[“The Mad Magazine TV special is brought to you by…” The introduction to the one and only foray into an animated version of the magazine in 1974 ends this sentence with silence. For forty-four years the magazine (and apparently the TV special as well) had no ads or sponsors.]

“And it was at that age … Poetry arrived/in search of me. […] there I was without a face/and it touched me.” These are lines from Pablo Nerudo, who Rhea Tregebov cites as one of her early influences. When I first approached Rhea to be my thesis supervisor at UBC, she was somewhat taken aback. I had applied to the Creative Writing program with an intent to write fiction, but poetry had suddenly sought me out and when I explained to Rhea what I wanted to write, her eyes welled up. Years later, when I read her book All Souls, I glimpsed a little of what had constituted her tears. In the poem “Night,” Rhea writes about the loss of her father. The poem, like all good poetry, is open to the profound loss any reader might bring to the page. From the context of the book, we know it’s Rhea’s father, but it could speak to anyone: “You’re going to have to live / without someone you love.” The poem ends: “An alteration / in the landscape of what was / your life, a mountain, an ocean gone” (68).

When we read the words of another how much of those words become our own?     

מים is water in Hebrew. I love the sound of this word: mayim. On its own, the /m/ sound necessitates a humming and the /y/ sound in the middle draws the back of the tongue up as if swallowing a mouthful of water. There are two shapes for /m/ in Hebrew and here we see them both: מים. Etymologically, the letter comes from the symbol for the Egyptian hieroglyph for water. In English, the shape of waves remains in the letter “m,” but in the Hebrew it’s squared as if each letter is a book writ small, and when I read the letter מ [/mem/] I hear the waters before creation spilling into memory. I like to think I can hear the place we all come from: the first waters that were the source of life on earth billions of years ago. I hear the place we all go where nothing is alphabetized, delineated, or captured in any form of technology. An all-embracing ocean that’s a reflection of the first.

If we acknowledge that we are living on Turtle Island, then water is something that we can hear around us along with the more immediate conflicts over lines, borders, and ways of being. In the video for Victoria Hanna’s “The Aleph-bet song (Hosha'ana),” there is one moment that gives me pause. Hanna is striking the blackboard which is transformed into soil as if to suggest that the letters which have been written on the board have come from the land itself. The land has produced the language. Googling “Victoria Hanna Palestine” reminds me that Israel is not just the land of milk and honey, but also conflict.  The first headline from the google search reades: “PSN requests the withdrawal of invitation for Victoria Hanna.” In the article, there is a statement from the Palestine Solidarity Network: “Our concern is that Victoria Hanna’s attendance at the festival would be a breach of the international boycott of apartheid Israel.”

“I’ve never done or spoken a single anti-Semitic word or act in my entire life, or had an anti-Semitic thought in my head in my entire life,” the former Pink Floyd bassist said. He was responding to the claim that his involvement in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement amounted to anti-semitism.

The charge is outlandish and the response is even more parodic. Since we live in a racist society with all sorts of messages swirling around don’t we all internalize from time to time what we’d rather not? I mean… “never... had an anti-Semitic thought?” I suppose he was making a point more than an empirically, factual statement.

Though facts presumably do help from time to time.

Of all the heinous traits exhibited by Donald Trump, it’s rare that he’s called an anti-semite. He’s on good terms with Israel’s long serving prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but in both cases we see how a government doesn’t necessarily represent a people; there are millions of Americans and Israelis who don’t believe in the toxic nationalisms espoused by their supposed leaders. Yes, there is a vicious anti-semitism around the world and yes Israel’s government has committed atrocities. In trying to understand the roots of the conflict, Noam Chompsky writes that “[t]he crimes trace back to 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled in terror or were expelled to Gaza by conquering Israeli forces, who continued to truck them over the border for years after the official cease-fire.”

{Now for something completely different by way of asides: there was one MAD fold in that was axed for its referencing of a mass shooting in 2013. 600,000 copies were destroyed for it being deemed in poor taste. The cartoonist, Al Jaffe, grew up in ‘Zarasai, a small town in Lithuania. Enduring constant hunger and bedbugs, Jaffee said those years “twisted my mind forever after that.”’ The world exists in poor taste and I wonder if we laugh to get that taste out of our mouths.} 

How do we find our way through? How do we make art that addresses, consoles, challenges, and helps us find our way through? Can we? What credentials do we need to enter the fray? How do we incorporate people, words, and ideas that may appear as problematic to others? Is it possible to imagine something as big as the world without harming others? Is a total artwork possible or even desirable? Richard Wager, a virulent anti-semite, coined the German word for total artwork Gesamtkunstwerk. Given the source, should this word be struck from dictionaries or is the fact of its continued existence and use by others enough to justify its use? Is the idea of a total artwork problematic in its very conception? Does the world need another Pink Floyd’s the Wall? How do we not twist and turn from laughter to tears?      

Last year, a privately financed Israeli spacecraft, whose mission was to land on the moon, crashed. One of its gyroscopes had failed. On the side of this space wreckage is written: בראשית.

In the beginning.

From time to time, we tire of beginnings and we jump in medias res into another approach. It seems new to us, but it looks ancient to someone else, and all we can do is hope, with all the wreckage in our hearts, to entangle ourselves within some new and useful combination.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W., and Brian O’Connor. The Adorno Reader. Blackwell, 2000.

Amichai, Yehuda. “"Jews in the Land of Israel." poemhunter, poemhunter.com/poem/jews-in-the-land-of-israel/comments/page-1/ Accessed 22 April 2020.

Barwin, Gary. Yiddish for Pirates. Penguin Random House, 2016.

Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel. “Assimilation.” Encyclopedia Judaica 3 1971, pp 770-83.

Chomsky, Noam. “Palestine 2012 — Gaza and the UN resolution Noam Chomsky” from https://chomsky.info/20121201/

Daniels, Peter T., and William Bright, editors. The World’s Writing Systems. Oxford Univ Pr, 1996.

Hanna, Victoria. “Victoria Hanna - The Aleph-bet song (Hosha'ana) Official video.” Youtube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl1epz3tSSA. Accessed 14 April 2020.

The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford UP, 1998.

Leslie, Alex. “The Neon Museum.” Brick Magazine, Issue 104 Winter 2020, pp. 121-128.

Rashi, “The Sefaria Library.” https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1.1?lang=bi&with=Rashi&lang2=bi

Tregebov, Rhea. All Souls. Vehicule Press, 2013.