When Winter Wind Wears Desert Boots

It's exciting putting out a new book. It's hard to describe. It all begins with an idea, a small seed, which slowly grows and creates constant turmoil in my mind. The seed becomes a story - and then the story begins to write itself. It is then that I know that a book is inside of me. And I rush to get it out, get it out before the rivers dry up and I lose my way.

But I do lose my way, many times, during the process. At times, I wonder who this is on the other side of the page. Whose story is this? Or can it belong to anyone?

A good friend read the finished draft manuscript and told me not to publish the book.
"You are risking too much by publishing it," he said.
"But it is fiction!" I exclaimed. "Why would this be putting myself at risk?"
"Because only you know what parts of it are fiction and what parts of it are not. And some people may see it all as real - an autobiography, perhaps - or maybe even a confession."
"If this is in any way a confession, then it is Daniel's confession," I said. "Although I think, if he still had a voice, he would claim it to be more of a legacy, than a confession."
"And he would want to believe that," my friend said. "As would you. Aren't you and Daniel the same person?"
"No. I am the author. Nothing more. He is my creation."

In my first book: "As I Died Laughing", there appeared to be no clear borders between the real and the unreal, between fact and fiction. In a continually fragmented plot, the author found it much easier to hide in the background. But there is nothing for the author to hide behind in: "When Winter Wind Wears Desert Boots". I stand there naked. There is truth in what I have to say, but I choose its maner of creation. The characters are real to the book. They begin and end there. Some of you will believe that you see yourselves in the book, but you are who you bring to the reading. And if you take away much more, then I have succeeded as a writer.

I have written two novels, and this second novel - "When Winter Wind Wears Desert Boots" - is the one that I believe will define me as a writer. Why do I put such emphasis on this second book? Because it is something that has been waiting to be written for a very long time. You may understand this much better when you read the book.

So, what is left? There was a time in my life when the act of writing, by itself, was enough. Just by putting words down on a page, I was in communion with self. But that is not enough, now. Not nearly enough. My words seek to be heard. They have lived in solitude, inside of me, for so long. And now, they no longer belong totally to me. They wander, seeking a new home, many new homes, as they live on and become real in the consciousness of others.

Another good friend asked me:
"What's it like knowing that there are people out there reading your most innermost thoughts at this very moment?"
I hesitated, but only for a fraction of a moment.
"As much as this may sound surprising," I answered, "it is a relief."
And I left it at that.

Time according to Facebook

Last week I discovered that I got married in 2007. Which sort of turned my world upside down. How do you suddenly explain to your kids that they were born out of wedlock? And how do I explain the discrepancy between the young man that appears in my wedding photos and the aging soul that stares out at me in the mirror each morning?

It all started when I clicked on Get Timeline on a friend’s Facebook page. “It couldn’t hurt,” I thought. “Facebook is continually reinventing itself. This is just another tidbit”. Or so I thought, just before I was sucked into a time warp.

My suspicions should have been aroused when I saw that my personal history began in the year 2007 - the same year that I joined Facebook. And especially where it claimed that I got married on the same day that I joined Facebook - August 9th, 2007. Facebook certainly takes personal status seriously.

It is as if this social experiment, called Facebook, was not quite enough for its founders and they decided to have Facebook become a scientific experiment as well. They had already redefined our place in the virtual world. Why not also redefine our place in the physical world? Will I soon discover that if I attempt to leave Facebook, my marriage will immediately dissolve, and I may find myself fading - both virtually and physically?

Sounds like a page out of my own book - As I Died Laughing. But then, that is supposed to be fiction, isn’t it?

But what harm is there in all of this? It’s not as if Facebook is seeking world domination. ”Lower your voice,” I tell myself, looking nervously back over my shoulder. When it comes down to it, Facebook is a democratic organization. Except for the fact that it keeps making changes without consulting us, and forces us to automatically accept them in the end, even if at first it tells us we have a choice. And then there is the Terms of Use agreement, which even my lawyer finds difficult to understand. But the bottom line is that Facebook would have long ceased to exist had it not constantly reinvented itself. And if we hadn’t reason to complain, we would have gone somewhere else by now. We love to complain about what we have, but are not yet ready to do without.

Which brings us back to the timeline and the year 2007. I have been filling in the cracks. Yes, although Facebook seems to have made it needlessly complicated with very little explanation on  how to add events outside of the Facebook years, I have managed. And although these events didn’t receive the Facebook stamp of approval, they are now officially within the realm of Facebook. I have found my way out and back in again. I am reminded of Truman in The Truman Show who discovered the escape door which led him outside of his alternate reality. Although I don’t know if he ever found his way back in. And which also begs the question: “Which side of the door is real?” And if one side is real, does this automatically make the other side fiction?

Personally, I enjoy these virtual worlds. I don’t know what I’d do without them. I can sit here, down in the Negev desert, the wind howling outside, the rain beating down on the roof - and speak out to the rest of the world. You may not be listening now, you may not be listening today or tomorrow.  But my words will be out there, floating around. Who knows who will read them. How does that make me feel? A rush of social adrenaline, perhaps. Or maybe I just enjoy talking to myself. Beats solitaire. Or maybe it is solitaire, of a totally different sort. Play on. Drop me a line if you think I am not alone.

Are Canadian writers Canadian enough?

“Are you Canadian enough to understand?” she asked.
“That depends,” I responded. “What do you mean by enough?”
“That’s a relief,” she said. “I thought you were going to ask me what I meant by Canadian.”

John Barber, in an article entitled “Are Canadian writers Canadian enough?” (The Globe and Mail - Oct. 29, 2011), bemoans the fact that the shortlists of three major Canadian award programs, designed to recognize the best Canadian fiction of 2011, included very few books with real Canadian content. By “Canadian content”, he is referring to something that is set in Canada or has something to do with Canada and its citizens.

I guess the first question we must ask ourselves is whether a Canadian writer can be separated from Canadian fiction. Can a writer of fiction, which is not recognized as Canadian fiction, still be considered a Canadian writer? Or does he belong to something else? Perhaps he should be considered an international writer, or a universal writer. But to whom does this make any sense? We are obsessed by affiliations. If we do not clearly belong to something, do we exist?

Barber indicates that the jurors of the Canadian writing awards would defend their choices for the Canadian fiction shortlist by stating that it is enough that Canadian  writers view the world, no matter where their stories take place, through Canadian eyes.

Canadian eyes. What does this mean exactly? Have you read a book about something taking place in another part of the world and told yourself, “Now, that really sounds Canadian”? If a movie, like “Cairo time”, were to be produced by an American, rather than a Canadian, would you say that it would definitely lose its distinctive Canadian flavour? Or do you think there was a distinctive Canadian flavour there in the first place.

One of the main problems that I have with my writing is where I fit into all of this. Does a Canadian expat, who has lived for over 30 years in a foreign country, even have the right to consider himself a Canadian writer? And even if we didn’t go by content alone and applied the measure of the Canadian awards jury - could I possibly say that I still see the world through Canadian eyes, after all of this time? Where does my adopted Israeli identity come into all of this?

If I had to choose between being called an Israeli writer or a Canadian writer, I would probably choose Canadian writer, mainly because all of my formative years took place in Canada. And this part of me cannot be forgotten, no matter how deeply buried it is. But, if I were in a court of law, the evidence would weigh heavily in the other direction.

For what defines an Israeli writer? I would say that first and foremost (and I am probably going to get into a lot of hot water over this remark), Israeli writers share a siege mentality. It doesn’t matter whether they live in Israel or abroad; whether they are Jewish, Arabic, Druze or Christian... the siege mentality is there, and it works its way through their writing - whether they are trying to break free or settle in and build stronger barricades. Do I share this siege mentality also? Definitely. Did it infiltrate into my psyche after arriving here in Israel? That is where the jury is still out. Many might say that it was already built in - that this siege mentality might have been one of the reasons why I left Canada in the first place and seemed to fit into Israeli society relatively easily. If so, how does a boy who was born in a small town by Lake Ontario and grew up in a rather sterile suburb of Toronto - develop a siege mentality? You’d have to ask one of my multiple personalities, I suppose.

So why can’t I call myself an Israeli writer? I have the required siege mentality. I married an Israeli sabra. My three children were born in Israel. We speak Hebrew at home. My aggressive driving through the streets of Tel Aviv would make most Israelis proud. My university education took place in Israel and I acquired my profession here. I say "we" for Israelis and “they” for Canadians. And I only began using “eh” late in life when I wanted to still sound at least a little bit Canadian.

But I think the jury will come back with a definite “no”. Why? Simply stated... I am not Israeli enough.

The Man who would be God

The characters worked their way in and out of the darkness. The only thing that seemed to give them life was the solitary light coming from the computer screen. Michael was all alone in the room. The only visitor was his muse. Yet he never knew when, or if, she’d appear again.

He looked again at the words on the screen. When was it that he had become the executioner? His virtual finger hovered over the send button. It would take only one click to become creator. Creating man out of his own likeness. He looked nervously around the room, wondering if he was being watched. How was this any different from the characters in his novel - from the imaginary world he had created for them?

Yet his characters had never tried to enter into his own world. They had attempted, perhaps, to escape the confines of his fiction through creating fiction of their own, having tasted from the tree of knowledge. But they had never sought to replace him.

And here he was, watching helplessly as he gradually lost control over his virtual creation. He had invited Guy to inhabit his world, help him rediscover what he thought he had lost. And instead, Guy revealed a new world that Michael couldn’t have. But it was the same world in which Michael was living. A world in which he and Guy could not both exist. Was Michael to be banished for trying to replace his own creator?

When do fiction and reality no longer exist in separate worlds - and mere mortals have the audacity to believe that they can change the laws of creation?

This is our journey of discovery in - “As I Died Laughing”.

"What are you mad at?"
"Everyone. Everything."
"What's so funny then?"
"The only thing I can do now is laugh."

And so it begins.

The Nothingness of Being

Ronald Green, in his book Nothing Matters, makes a distinction between nothing and nothingness. Nothing, he claims, is the absence of everything, whereas nothingness is the absence of something. An important distinction. But how do we distinguish, then, between something and nothingness?

 How much room is there in the human consciousness? For everything added, must something else be erased? How much love are we capable of giving? Can we have multiple relationships without one coming at the expense of another? Can we spread our love evenly between our children, without one receiving more, and the other less? When we learn things, must we forget others? Is consciousness the something and the sub-consciousness the nothingness? Whereas nothing appears to be absolute, nothingness is not. We appear able to slip in and out of nothingness. But what comes first - something or nothingness, the chicken or the egg? Can we only conceive of nothingness after we have conceived of something and recognized its absence?

As an example of slipping in and out of nothingness, I’ll take you back to an earlier blog entry - Why Guinness always tastes better in Tel Aviv. There I told you about how Ronald and I would reach great moments of enlightenment over pints of Guinness at Molly Blooms only to have these amazing revelations quickly evaporate into nothingness on our separate ways home. At the time, I thought they were gone for good, but I was mistaken. They resurfaced somehow in two separate books: Ronald’s Nothing Matters which delves deep into the concept of nothing, offering a clear, comprehensive and in-depth study of non-fiction; and my As I Died Laughing which sets out in a dysfunctional and fragmented exploration into the distinction between something and nothingness, supposedly a work of fiction.

It seems as if we are constantly moving back and forth into nothingness and the something which generated it. In leaving country, language and culture behind, my new Israeli identity has erased many parts of the Canadian identity which preceded it. The longer I have lived here in Israel, the further back into nothingness one would expect the exile of my Canadian self to be. But this hasn’t been the case. Recently I have found parts of my Canadian identity, which I thought were lost, fighting their way back into consciousness. I hear that this is not a phenomenon unique to my own personal expatriate existence. Apparently many people find themselves on a curve in their acclimatization to a new country and culture. They struggle to adapt to their new country, and just when they reach  the pinnacle of feeling almost native to the new language and culture, they enter into a period of recession - their former identity subtly reappearing out of their nothingness. And the main difference is that they no longer feel the need to apologize for, or try to stifle, this something that had apparently never gone away.

Which brings us to the concept of being. What does all this matter if we are going to die? And then everything becomes nothing - earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust - from nothing we came, and into nothing we return. But can we refer the concept of nothing to the concept of being? If nothing is absolute - the absence of everything - then how could anything be created out of it? If our being was nothing before our conception in birth, how could we have ever come about? And if nothing is the absence of everything, how can we enter into the state of nothing after we die. Something surely cannot become a part of nothing. This is probably unexpectedly comforting to many - linking our being to nothingness rather than nothing - believing that by slipping into nothingness, we can slip back into something again. All religions seem to have built their basic premise on this belief, although they all label it differently. For me, personally, I have no room in my vocabulary for an omnipotent being. I have enough of a problem trying to come to terms with my own being. Rather, at this point, it is simply a matter of logic; albeit human logic.

Understanding being, even without taking into account the state of being before our conception and after our death, has puzzled thinkers throughout the ages. A child cannot differentiate between itself and a separate world at first. It goes through a cognitive development where it suddenly becomes aware of objects separate from itself. And then later, it is also able to differentiate between these objects. Is this something that the child is taught, or acquires through experimentation in this new world? Or is it a part of our cognitive programming? And if so, why does it take time for this programming to be activated? Is our cognitive programming the nothingness through which all somethings are recognized? Does this help us understand which comes first - the chicken or the egg?

If something came from nothingness, then the process could hypothetically be reversed. Under special circumstances, we might find ourselves returning to a womb like state. Let us consider the example of Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier who has been held in captivity for the last five years by the Hamas, and who will apparently be released in a few days. Gilad has had no real human contact in the last five years. He has been confined to a solitary cell where his only reality is the things inside these four walls that he can see, hear, touch and smell. Over time, the construct of this reality must have slowly filled his consciousness, pushing back everything he had known before then into nothingness. And in Gilad’s case, we must ask ourselves if there is a point of no return, where something is pushed so far back into nothingness that it is lost forever. For Gilad has come as close as possible to nothing - the absence of everything - as appears humanly possible. Upon his release, will he capable of recognizing a world he once new? Or will this once again become a learning experience? For Gilad, his being hasn’t changed. But for his family and closest friends, they will search for a being that they recognize,and they may have to come to the realization that he is now a stranger. Must we then divide being into two? Who we know ourselves to be and how others see us? After we die, if we do still exist in nothingness or in something, the recognition of our present being is in our eyes only. Others still recognize our being, even after our death, but they only recognize what they remember of us.

Life is frail. There is no doubt about that. And it is finite - no matter what we do. Yet we never give up on our search for meaning. Maybe we just have to learn that meaning can come out of nothingness, just as much as it can come out of something. Or maybe we need to take one step further and come to the realization that there isn’t any real difference between the two.