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Jericho – Art Knows No Borders Blog 7/11

9.01.16

I wander lost through the fields outside of Jericho. I have unwisely decided to stay at a much decayed “Eco-village.” 17 Kilometers outside of the city of Jericho, there is a small meandering track through fields and lush, verdant, yards that leads from the crumbling and windswept compound to a small roadside restaurant, surrounded by several small supermarkets, and at least 5 stores that seem to specialize in the same multicolored plastic chairs. The scenery pleasantly conjurers memories of remote villages in Lao and Thailand. I considering the common cultural elements of both the decomposing, trash strew, brightness of the poor east, and the remote sterile cities of affluent European descent. Cheap building techniques, decay, and the vibrancy of chaos.

On the way back I stop to talk with the owner of one of the supermarkets, who seems anxious to aggressively complain in a manner that is recognizable in the chronically angry the world over. In a surprising change of pace he declares “America bad”, mirroring the otherwise ubiquitous “America good.” Despite frequent denunciations of the occupation, he is surprisingly open and welcoming to his Israeli customers, seemingly no less comfortable with them than their Palestinian counterparts.

The delay costs me the last light, and walking back from the turn off I am quickly disoriented by the winding paths and terminuses. Beneath an ancient sky where I do not recognize the foreign stars, and in this, the most ancient of cities, at the bottom of the world, where the pressurized air is heavy and hot, I find myself at last aware of how far I have wandered…

The “cooperative” eco-village seems like all things peace related, a decayed-relic of a more optimistic time. A result of the ambitious Friends of The Earth Middle East; in its mud building techniques and bright children’s play area, and incomplete geodesic dome, I recognize a common guiding-hand shared with other, more active, eco-villages. Despite bold claims about its cross-border team, it is as devoid of Israelis as it is a reminder of the prospect of peace in this war torn land.

As is the crack strewn tower I have run my fingers across today, which dates from an age so far distant as to be forever unrecognizable. The depth of the passage of time is barely comprehensible, and the walls I have walked were an ancient legend already when their story was first retold in the Book of Joshua. And yet, their is a familiarity, and each epoch of its 10 millennia journey is punctuated in marks of suffering and conquest.

-Alex

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Bethlehem – Art Knows No Borders Blog 6/11

8.29.16

The maze of corridors of the old city is comforting as it envelops you in a shocking onrush of exoticism that would not have felt entirely different to another wanderer, in another age. The chaotic market winds itself through narrow stone streets between recessed stone archways gather close I have been to many suqes and many old cities, and there is always something surprising that such places still exist, having not yet been wholly swallowed by the same onrush of modernity that has, like a great leviathan, devoured history in an iconoclastic whitewash of glass, steel, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. The feeling is intensified in Bethlehem, as it is likewise in the Old City of Jerusalem, where there is a continuity with the past that is equally absent in the West and the Far East. Perhaps it is due to the fact that, despite the throngs of tourists, this is a city that is still alive, its people not yet divested of authenticity by the gold of the modern pilgrims of capitalism.

The same family home where I sleep, its rooms now coursing with harsh florescence, once housed crusaders and Sarcsians. I find much in common with the daughter of the motherly innkeeper, and we share common themes of travel, loss, generosity; a loss of a brother mirrors a loss of a mother, and I find the veil of otherness shifting away once again. Our conversations also however brings to mind a difference in our perceptions. A devout Christian, though she tries to restrain herself, she finds in my sympathetic ear an outlet for her faith. It is difficult to tell if we talk past each other due to the limits of our shared language, or due more to experience. For her god is distinct and external, and eternity must wait until death. Religion is not a delicate topic here, footsteps away from the birthplace of a god, and unconventional spirituality blossoms more here, a spring from which some new faith will again come, and again sweep out over the secular void.

-Alex

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The Old and the New – Art Knows No Borders Blog 5/11

8.24.16

Each local attraction I visit is closed for, in succession, the day, the week, and the month. In my heat-born ascents and and descents among the step hills of Amman however I find myself beginning to grow into the surroundings. In each trip up the twisting stairs that wind through the bright cream of decaying stone buildings, through narrow alleys, past the shuttered homes and smaller cloistered yards, and through the strewn trash of modernity; soft-drink bottles, scraps of cardboard, discarded children toys, I find the inhabitants becoming less strange.

As the veil of otherness slips, the conservatism of the culture begins to remind me of a not-so distant age in America’s past; the old, judgmental man on the bus begins to remind me of my own grandfather, slipping into the sea of time, assaulted by confusing values in changing world; speeding out of control towards a future past the imaginings of even of his descendants, the supposed authors of this new dawn, from which they too must learn to fear in time.

This impression is heightened by a trip to a local dance-club, where Amman’s youth drink and sweat with abandon among the foreign accents of distant countries, until they are carried out, quite literally on the backs of their fellows as the music bellows and swells to the same American songs that play in the same winding succession in identical rooms in Tel Aviv, London, and likely even still, in some recondite, cloistered alley among the ruins of Aleppo.

-Alex

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Outsiders – Art Knows No Borders Blog 4/11

8.23.16

Fanning the flames of conflict the world over are the righteous. The zealots who pull the trigger are matched by the outsiders, who gilt in their own armor of ignorance, bay for the blood they will not have to taste. I was asked today by a determined American how my Jewishness related to my views on Israel. It was an accusation posed as a question. While seemingly satisfied by my opposition to occupation, the conversation brought out ugly and ancient stereotypes with ease, and more importantly drew a line between us. It reminded me not at all with my conversations with my Arab friends, but quite a bit of conversations I have had with politically conservative Americans.

In my experience many liberal western outsiders are often equally as boldly sanguine as their hawkish conservative counterparts, equally ready to excuse and promote the atrocities they will never have to suffer. Will they still remember conflict and occupation in another decade I wonder? Or will they forget the role they played, forget the seeds of violence they encouraged, move onto to some new war or cause célèbre even as the blood continues soak into the sand, unchanged. The alternative to peace is not justice, and I doubt either will be birthed out of the womb of war.

-Alex

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A Setback – Art Knows No Borders Blog 3/11

8.22.16

Strange dreams come to me in the night like omens. Memories of a hidden vigor returning to forgotten veins, imbuing dim reserves with fresh light and leavings. An unknown lover dissolves at dusk as I cross a dangerous threshold, their place taken by a protective guide who leads me past strange piles of dismembered limbs demanding favors, where it is unclear whether acquiescence or denial is the damnable outcome. When I wake there is only the soft reality of the hard hostel bed.

There is a bad news today, the organization that we were scheduled to work with in Jordan has withdrawn from the collaboration, specifically citing fear of social ostracization by an anti-normalization group. While frustrating, the setback provides insight into both the depth of cultural opposition to anything, however tenuously, linked to Israel, and paradoxically, also its shallowness.

A conversation with a Taxi driver on the way back from a local ruin elucidates the situation via an anecdote about the normalization of the fruit trade. As one of the closest suppliers of fresh produce, Israeli fruit is ubiquitous in Jordan for reasons of both cost and freshness. The immense social pressure to boycott Israeli products however prevents vendors from selling the fruit openly. This conflict is resolved pragmatically by vendors who remove and laboriously replace Israel destination stickers with fraudulent ones from other neighboring counties such as Egypt or Lebanon. Such acts are common place and an open secret.

Israeli manifests like a specter, or perhaps a contagion, here. A touch is damnation, even when the fruit is not rotten. The intersections of identity, compassion, practicality, and suffering are a labyrinthine causeway over a perilous expanse.

-Alex

 

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Arrivals and Departures – Art Knows No Borders Blog 2/11

8.21.16

Screaming from the peaceful abyss of the sky into the dim, hard realities of land scarcely more firm, my aluminum chariot touches down in Amman at 10:00 pm Jerusalem time. Delayed in Paris for three hours, when I arrive in Jordan it will be dead-eyed and swaying, sleepless for two days. The Parisian airport is graceful and old before its time, it sleek lines and bright colors aged with dignity, yet somehow also willfully obtuse. The flight passes uneventfully as we move over and past the calm, pleasant greens of southern France. Having dozed fitfully among the sky, when I awake it is in an altogether different world.

Border control and customs in Jordan is casual and perfunctory, and though I make my way out of the airport with haste I have already missed my planned encounter with May. Due to sleep loss I haggle badly with the taxi driver, who, obviously tired himself, half-hardheartedly tries the usual tout scams through the blare of wind and loud chant-like Arabic music that crescendos into the passing night.

-Alex

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Introductions – Art Knows No Borders Blog 1/11

8.03.16

Welcome to the Art Knows No Borders blog! We are a newly formed art organization focused on raising awareness of trans-boundary issues in the Levant through art and education. Our team includes, myself, Oregon based artist and adventurer Noah Alexander Stein, Chilean artist, dancer, and educator, May Garces, trans-boundary researcher and artist, Sofia Kosel. This blog is dedicated to chronicling and sharing our experiences understanding the roots of inter-cultural conflict in the Levant. There is a long road ahead of us and I hope you join us on our journey as we struggle to piece together the broken bridges of our shared humanity!

– Noah Alexander Stein

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The Bardo

New painting and written piece:

The Bardo, or A Memory of Death, 2015

“…That the collection ever imagined itself as a thing apart was always an illusion, cast like a shadow by the singular light of consciousness. For even existentially, as beings that dream tales of a life lived and a narrative concluded, we were deceived. The great change that we defined as oblivion was inseparable from our breath. As we closed our eyes each night we, with unreasonable faith, trusted that that which left us would return. With each moment passed we did not mourn for the eddy of ourselves lost in the stream. Even the memories that we held with such precarious grips, that we swore gave truth to the lie, shift like dunes in the deserts of our individuality…”

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Encountering the Bardo

The blinding light of death is the dissolution of individuality, absolute, consumptive, binding and limited; we are beings of both individual sparks and universal light. The flame that we carry is not selfish, and the births and metamorphoses engendered by death maintain a continuity even as given facets are extinguished. Through the kaleidoscope of change and destruction, love and rebirth, the raw spirits that coalesce into beings that perceive themselves and fear the unknown, remain untouched by the scattering.

The Bardo
The Bardo, 2015

Through an examination of this same self however, concepts of post-death states and reincarnations begin to be perceivable in their actuality. The root of this conceptual-self stems from the consciousness that interprets sensory input and imagines itself as a disparate entity, tied to a given physical apparition, self-constructed through narratives, habits, traits, and ultimately acts. This perspective is, at best, a half-truth, for it fails to consider the instrument of perception. Indeed the existence of an implicit physical world is itself a product of internal conceptualization. When sense, memory, and thought are understood as malleable, the dependent assumption of immutable physicality, and the ends implied by its decay, must inevitably be discarded.

It is in many ways a sacred moment when the dusty collection of particulate is at last dissolved into the universal, suspended in the primordial water, before emerging once more in new forms and acts. That the collection ever imagined itself as a thing apart was always an illusion, cast like a shadow by the singular light of consciousness. For even existentially, as beings that dream tales of a life lived and a narrative concluded, we were deceived. The great change that we defined as oblivion was inseparable from our breath. As we closed our eyes each night we, with unreasonable faith, trusted that that which left us would return. With each moment passed we did not mourn for the eddy of ourselves lost in the stream. Even the memories that we held with such precarious grips, that we swore gave truth to the lie, shift like dunes in the deserts of our individuality.

A better question than what follows death then might be what is the nature of the entity that perceives death? If the self-construct that perceives the physical is not defined by it, physical death may be regarded as a minor schism. Acts of transcendence can, in their turn, be understood as acts of self-identification, where an ego defines itself, not by a specific physical manifestation, but immaterially.

The immutability of death thus emerges as a reflection on the limits of an ego, rather than an incontrovertible trait of the universe. When the thin film of materiality peels back to reveal the light of the abyss, we are left with what is ultimately a choice; as the imagined manifest of an ego, be extinguished, or as the avatar of the universal, embrace the change, as we have ten-ten-thousand times before.

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The Devouring Light

Hati Hróðvitnisson / The Devouring Light
Hati Hróðvitnisson / The Devouring Light, 2015

There is such beauty in the unordered, unrestricted natural flow of life that, following its own internal pattern, grows in a harmonious chaotic mass of being. So far from the manicured greenspaces and carefully sculpted lives that inhabit the great spiritual deserts of modern cities. Plagued by isolation, the lives spent in their cages cry out with desperation, plainly visible for those who have walked outside the walled garden.

In an existence so devoid of life. Roiled in sexuality so devoid of passion. Consumption without satiation. Every aspect of, true, unfiltered life shoved with urgency into stiff molds. A death that would be better without the false vestiges inhabiting empty forms.

We are not this. We were made to run free beneath the stars, with unfettered passions in a world as alive as our hearts. As the city reaches its claws into the sky and strangles the distant shimmering harmonies of light and swallows with a dull half-glow a night bleached of darkness; even the blackness of death is robbed from us.

The wildness in our souls must not be so quenched. Our breath must be like the thunder over the plains, overgrown and alive. Night must be allowed to return so that the stars, eternal beneath the shroud of unlight, can shine again, so that we can truly die, and guided by the stars, return and truly live.