This week was the last week in which I had to teach at Bar Ilan University's creative writing program.
Although most of the classes were conducted through Zoom, it was a good respite from the terrible state of affairs the world is currently in. The ability to focus on books and deal with something that is beyond the constant news cycle was great. It reminded over and over again how important imagination is to the human soul.
You can't always find the key to this kingdom. Matching the books to this period is a complex task akin to finding a precise cure to a disease. For example, I cannot get myself to read Kafka's books during this pandemic. Perhaps because, like many others, I feel trapped in a maze with the closed skies up above and the lack of a horizon, any horizon. This makes it impossible for me to dive into another Kafkaesque maze.
Yesterday I dreamed that I was outside in a nature spot in Jerusalem. I dreamed that there was a big "Off" switch there. After a minute or two of hesitation I went to that switch in my dream and pressed on it, leaning with my entire body weight. Immediately after, silence set in all over, and the area around me became painted in light colors. I woke up with calm and pleasant colors around and I didn't have to call my dream analyst in order to understand the subconscious meaning of it all.
During these days of the "Is this really the second wave?" my hands tremble as I think of just tuning out of the news; switching everything off: the figures on the dead, the morbidity rates, the confirmed and unconfirmed cases, the positive and negative data and so forth. I would like to silence the news pundits who keep chattering on the "situation" and "what needs to be done" and then finish with, "Let's go back and check with the corona ward that has just been inaugurated at the hospital."
On one of those days this week I went down to the street and on the nearby bench an old couple was sitting down. The man took an apple from a basket and started peeling in circular motions. When he finished, he sliced the apple and offered some of it to his wife. I stood next to them, watching through my sunglasses. The world around them had turned on its head, and they have probably not seen their grandchildren (if they have any) for a long time, and here they are busy with an apple, with the same determination of newscasters who keep pumping the airwaves with hysteria. They ate one slice after another, and when they noticed me they offered me too. The situation and their gesture made me teary-eyed.
It's really hard for me to listen to all these cliches about the solidarity of Israelis. Everywhere I go people keep mentioning how our leaders flouted the very restrictions they had imposed on the people; how the rich people got waivers from the lockdown, and how people have automatically been blaming the public for the situation, how the government is not really helping the people who have lost money with grants and compensation and we see people in the Health Ministry deal with power struggles rather than harness the help of private labs in order to ease the burden of testing. And we remember. We remember how incompetent people are and how the sense of being together has been replaced with a sense of helplessness, a lack of trust in institutions, and convergence on personal survival. From now on, every man to himself.
A moment before I start my class on writing, I go to the library and take Charles Dicken's Little Dorrit. This is not one of his classics, but his depiction of red tape as the Circumlocution Office that never stops has always had always appealed to me. It appears that this description, whose origins are in the kingdom of imagination, a small intimate kingdom, is very relevant to our reality today in this big kingdom: The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.
