after an exhausting trip and the world has shifted a little but not changed.
Ebola is now the biggest terror and ISIS has been relegated to page two. Turkey is bombing the Kurds – but, wait, I thought they were on our side – the Israelis are banning Palestinian Muslims from worshipping at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, the Egyptian government is arresting students, and we have a three-inch pile of campaign mailings.
It must be Tuesday.
I’m not sure that I even know what to say about this except that the Israelis are not even pretending to be serious about peace. This is land that Palestinians are living on near Bethlehem and according to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, The announcement follows the cabinet’s decision last week to take over the land in response to the June kidnapping and killing of three teenage Jewish boys by Hamas militants in the area. I guess that it is just a case of Lebensraum but, still it makes me sad.
I think that I will just quote Emily Hauser, a Jewish activist, and leave it at that.
On hope, losing.
The Ten Stages of Losing Hope:
Stage One – You have hope, but wow. Things are bad.
Stage Two – You have hope, but sometimes you’re not sure why.
Stage Three – You refuse to give up hope. Despair is a luxury.
Stage Four – Your heart clings to hope even though your head tells your heart that it’s a fool, and with increasing frequency.
Stage Five – You believe that you have lost all hope, and then something terrible happens, and you lose a little bit more, which means you must have had some hope left to lose.
Stages Six, Seven, and Eight – Repeat Stage Five, each time with a smaller sliver of previously unsuspected residual hope.
Stage Nine – You genuinely have no hope left, but you continue to behave as though you do, because you believe that the performance of hope has value.
Stage Ten – You give up.
As regards Israel/Palestine, I reached Stage Ten in February. For that and other reasons, I’m going back to school next week to get a second Masters Degree, this one in Library and Information Science.
I bought a pair of minimalist – for lack of a better descriptor – shoes the other day because I have been, increasingly, having problems with my feet. A couple of months ago, I started to worry that I had somehow broken a bone in my foot because I had such sharp shooting pains. After X Rays, the doctor assured me that it was only Arthritis.
Because of the pain, I started walking less and that only made it worse. Finally, I went to Michele’s Chiropractor who is somewhat of a holistic healer. He gave me a heavy-duty massage – with what he called a jack-hammer, it was very strong – and told me to soak my feet in hot water, get massages, and walk barefoot around the house more (since I never walk barefoot, anything would be more). Also, he told me that my shoes were too stiff and I should Get a pair of minimalist shoes.
All of this has been counter intuitive, at least for me, but I am walking around the house with only socks, soaking my feet in hot water, and I have even gotten a foot massage. I also got a pair of New Balance Minimus Trail Shoes. I have been wearing Keen Trail Shoes and they are fairly heavy-duty, in theory to protect my feet.
I knew switching shoe styles would be somewhat of a shock because the Keens are designed to cushion my heel when I land heel first and the New Balance have no heel padding. What I didn’t expect was the feeling of familiarity I got when I first put them on. Pulling the shoes on – and putting the shoes on is closer to putting on socks than it is to slipping into some comfortable old shoe – I was flooded with memories of pulling on my track shoes. I think that the last time I wore track shoes was May of 1958. That is over 56 years ago and they still – instantly – felt familiar. Now just picking the shoes up brings back those familiar feelings.
It is not specific feelings, I am not brought back to that feeling of standing on a hard track on a warm day, I am not transported in time. I pick up the first shoe and it is lighter than I expected and I am aware that my hands, my muscles – not my mind – are being careful not to grab the front with the sharp cleats. I loosen the laces and open the shoes as much as possible, then I pull them over my feet. I have to run my thumb around the back to get my heel in and, as I run my thumb around, bringing the soft shoe back up over the back of my heel, it all feels so every day. Everyday now, not every day then.
It is not like my mind remembers, it is like my muscles remember. I like that.
My daddy, Alfred Joseph Stern, was born on December 2, 1906 in San Francisco. He died in May of 1968, I still miss him.
I just read that Nina Cassian died. Until I read her full-page obit in The Economist, I had no idea who she was – or even that she existed – but, after reading a couple of samples, I am loving her poetry. She was Jewish Romanian (the Jewish part is cultural not religious and, for that matter – the Romanian part is technically, I guess – only until she was granted asylum in the US in 1985 after a friend of her’s was beaten to death because of one of her poems).
Her poetry reflects that kind of Eastern European, Jewish, humor that has so informed the last 30 years of American humor (think Jerry Seinfeld or Andrei Codrescu if you listen to NPR). Typical of Cassian’s humor, and the O’Henry type twists she seems to favor, is Please Give This Seat to an Elderly or Disabled Person, a poem displayed in New York City subways by the Poetry in Motion program.
I stood during the entire journey
nobody offered me a seat
although I was at least a hundred years older than anyone else on board,
although the signs of at least three major afflictions
were visible on me:
Pride, Loneliness, and Art.
What drew my attention to her is a poem she wrote before her exile. It is a poem that I can definitely relate to. While it reflects on a meeting with the Romanian dictator, Ceausescu, it sums up what I think we all feel after a political argument that has gone nowhere.
With rational syllables
I try to clear up the occult mind
and promiscuous violence.
My linguistic protest has no power
The enemy is illiterate.
The world is a richer place because of Nina Cassian and our country, in particular, is a richer place because of Eastern European immigrants. Growing up, I was taught that the center of Europe and by extension, the center of history was somewhere between England and France. OK, Spain and Germany were players part of the time and it all started in Italy, but Eastern Europe was half way down the civilization ladder to Czarist Russia with its serfs. Lately I have began to think that I was taught the wrong European view. Eastern Europe was a huge influence on what we call Western civilization. I have been reading Tony Judt and reading about Oppenheimer and all the Eastern European scientists that have made our new – sometimes very scary – world.
We worship England and France, but – over the last sixty or seventy years – Eastern Europe may have had the biggest influence.