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.
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There is a bad news today, the organization that we were scheduled to work with in Jordan has withdrawn from the collaboration, specifically citing fear of social ostracization by an anti-normalization group.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.
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.
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!
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, 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.
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.
“That is true, he said. And do you not suppose, Adeimantus, that a single boxer who was perfect in his art would easily be a match for two stout and well-to-do gentlemen who were not boxers?” – Plato, The Republic
The answer should be obvious that an ideal boxer, one who was perfect at their art, could defeat an limitless number of opponents. Just as the ideal artist could infinitely alter the viewer. The ideal farmer could feed hungry minds. The perfect knife could cut though paradoxes and truths. All such ideals ultimately approach the same singular concept of “perfection.” Infinite anything, once enacted, implies infinite everything. Our previously mentioned ideal artist would, through their ideal art, create an ideal reality. One that was, in practice, no different than that of the ideal knife.
Perfection is a curious concept. Such conceptual singularity is at the root of the Western concept of an immutable God. The idea that makes up this core, on which so many other ideas are either explicitly or implicitly base, is that God, rather than existing as a being of infinite perfection, is perfection itself. The unreachable concept, inexplicable but self-evident, the ideal being, the perfect work of art, are all in their ways descriptors for this singularity that all things might reach, given the infinite.
As matter approaches light each incremental increase in speed requires an exponential increase in energy. So too does any work, as it approaches perfection, require ever increasing effort to attain even the smallest incremental increase towards its ideal. Matter must not despair however; the tail of the serpent is also its beginning. The great paradox is that to achieve the unattainable one must accept the perfection in imperfection. The world is ideal already, as is the knife.
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Genesis 3:17 – 19
Leaving the Garden, 2015
One of the most interesting recurring motifs in near-eastern religion is the idea of mankind’s fall. Preceded by a state of harmony with the natural world, and precipitated by forbidden knowledge, it is the fall that leads to mankind’s current state of toil and mortality. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the myth catalyzes in the tale of the wild-man, Enkidu’s, sexual seduction and resulting understanding of language and civilization. In Abrahamic mythology it takes the form of the first man and first woman’s temptation with, and eventual consumption of, the symbolic fruit of knowledge. Persisting though minor variations, all stories end with the same result: a resounding human disharmony with the natural world, and the pain of death.
The common narrative elements of harmonious innocence, sexual temptation, knowledge, and an ultimate separation from natural grace reflect both a common heritage and also a persisting resonance. As a result of the long history of the story, myriad interpretations have attempted to account for its origin and enduring power. True to that nature of myths there can be no single, all-encompassing, explanation or account. Nevertheless, from the deluge of meanings can be extracted a critical account of one of the most basic principles of humanity’s interaction with the natural world.
Population of a species at any given time are generally the result of an equilibrium between resources, depredation, and natality. Fluxes in any of these variables triggers a reactive response that adapts to the imbalances. The responsiveness of the system results in both sustainable populations as well as dynamic ecosystems that are able to recover from periods of instability. Population explosions that occur during periods of surplus are thus followed by periods of constriction when the resource is eventually exhausted. The size of this contraction naturally varies depending on the imbalance, ranging from minor seasonal variance, to outright collapse when a severe disparity between resources and a dependent population arises.
The same forces can also be seen acting on and guiding the growth of human societies. While the resource in question may vary between time and place, from grain stocks and clean water, to fossil fuels and timber, the principles remain remarkably consistent. Unlike other species however, human populations are subject to a further factor that permits ever-increasing growth and mitigates contraction. For humans, the vagaries of the cycle are mitigated by technological innovation which permits either the better use of a given resource or, far more often, the exploitation of a new resource to fill the gap left by the consumed one.
One of the earliest and most dramatic examples of this is the Neolithic revolution. Rapidly advancing cultural sophistication and a changing climate caused a human population explosion that culminated in the extinction of the large migratory herd mammals that had previously sustained the growth. The imminent collapses facing societies dependent on these species however was averted by a rapidly shifting reliance on agriculture, hitherto used only as a supplemental food source. During this period of transition, societies by necessity left behind the more prosperous nomadic hunter-gather lifestyle for the more arduous life of sedentary agriculture.
While the innovations granted by the fruit of knowledge provided a reprieve from human collapse, it has not permitted such grace for the ecosystems we inhabit, and ultimately depend upon. Lacking periods of reduced pressure, damaged ecosystems and exhausted resources are rarely allowed to recover, and are instead faced with continued human expansion. As the emergence of agriculture once triggered vast tracks of forest being burned for farmland, so now does rapid climate change and urban expansion ravage remaining ecosystems. This pattern has replayed itself without pause as civilization has spread and decimated every natural ecosystem which it has encountered.
As various inevitable end points now, at last, begin to converge in our distant view, we are faced with ever-contracting options. Unlimited growth, no matter how mitigated by technological advance, will inevitably consume all non-human systems. As we now eye the stars with greedy vision, we must face the realization that the same tree of knowledge that has saved us will destroy us, or else, inevitably lead us on into the final exile.
