Here's looking at you, kid.

In my early years

I like the early summer mornings, stepping out of the shower to feel the cool breeze on my naked skin. Slowly letting my body air dry. This is my hour, not to be shared with anyone else as I move through the house, still dripping wet.

A few days ago, while nearing the end of this intimate moment of privacy, I stepped out onto the open balcony to hang up my wet towel. And, as is often their habit, a small herd of Ibex had collected on the lawn below, munching contentedly on the grass offering. I stood there quietly for a moment watching them, when suddenly an ibex, one of the younger ones, looked up and saw me standing there, totally naked. He froze in utter fright. Others sensed his fear and looked up, also. It only took a few seconds for the stampede to begin, the ibex making a hasty retreat, back to the wadi from whence they came. Should I have taken offence at this comment on my natural state of being? No, I have learned to roll with the punches and look on the bright side. I may have stumbled across a solution to thwarting their marauding ways: the human scarecrow.

These are the same ibex that allow me to walk slowly and steadily through their ranks on my way to work. Seeing me approach, they will pause their munching for a moment, and then, registering no great danger,  return to their early morning breakfast while keeping track of me through a corner of their eye. How do we explain the former chaos, then? Why should my not wearing clothes make such a difference? Could it be that they do not recognize me in my nakedness? Doesn't that conflict with our instinct? Shouldn't I be most recognizable when I have no masks to hide behind?

As for the neighbours, I haven't received any complaints... so far. Most people are still not up by the time I complete my naked ritual. Although one morning, I thought I caught a few flashes going off from the neighbour's window opposite. Someone taking pictures? Collecting nude pictures of me, perhaps, that could be used against me in a future neighbourhood dispute? I doubt if they were doing this for their own artistic pleasure.

What is it about our bodies, then? Why do some bodies attract and others repel? Why do some look better covered up in clothing and makeup while others look best in their natural glory? Are we genetically programmed to find certain bodily structures more pleasant to the eye? Is this a part of our cognitive structure? And why do we describe one person as merely attractive, while we describe another as stunning? I must admit that I enjoy watching attractive women. One of my guilty pleasures. Come on... aren't we all like that? "You can look, but no touch," Molly told Andrew as he appeared excited by the Israeli female form - quite unlike what he was used to in Oregon. If we aren't flustered at times by a beautiful human figure, then it may be time for someone to check our pulse.

But it isn't all about the curves, all in the right places, is it. As a seasoned armchair woman watcher, I maintain that there is much more to it than that. The eyes have it.
"Oh no," you say, "you aren't going to tell us next that the eyes are the window to the soul. When all you are really interested in is looking at her butt."
Well, call me abnormal. I have been called abnormal about so many other things. But while I may find a woman attractive upon first look, my interest quickly fades away if an attractive figure is all there is. And forgive me for harping on this, but it is in the eyes. If the eyes are vacant, she simply becomes another faceless figure in the crowd.

*This is the time to remind you that I am married and this is merely an armchair sport. Especially since my wife and inlaws sometimes read my blogs, as well as my children, sister and mother...
"You've been dodging the silver bullet for some time," my good friend says to me. "It may have just caught up to you."
I shift uncomfortably in my chair. "They will understand," I say, but this time with a little less conviction.

But let's forget the attractive human body and go back to talking about mine. I do think that after that rather quick response of the Ibex to my naked body, I do deserve a second opinion: this time human. But how do I go about that without appearing to be a pervert? I don't want to make the morning headline - "Naked man shot by police as he reached for.." what exactly?

If we look at my 19-year-old figure above, I once had a body worth keeping. But we can't, can we. Keep it, I mean. Nobody can. Not even those celebrity stars with their botox filled frozen faces. As if someone would really want to kiss that. Much scarier than my naked body, in my humble opinion. But then, I am subjective, aren't I.

In my winter years

The irony about it all is that I probably look better now than I have in the last ten years. I have lost a lot of weight, although I consciously haven't done anything to explain that change. My posture is much better than it has ever been and I am walking much more naturally. I guess I should thank Parkinson's for this. It threw down the glove and I am trying now to gain early ground.

And I have two secret weapons to help me in this struggle:  a badass Pilates instructor and a badass neurologist.  They leave no room for self-pity. The Pilates instructor reminds me of an unwavering drill sergeant. Nothing gets past her. "Body straight, shoulders back! Do you think I don't see you slouching!" My Russian neurologist reminds me of the Russian woman officer at passport control at the Moscow airport where, at one point, I thought she was about to send me to a Russian jail. She didn't understand why I had only a visa for Kazakhstan when I was going to Kyrgyzstan, albeit through Kazakstan. And of course, she didn't speak any English.

You see, that is exactly what I need. Not someone to let me cut corners and try to warmly encourage me. No, they have to be ruthless, within reason. So maybe the ibex had it right, all along.

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.

Walking among the ibex

“Where have all the flowers gone?” my wife asked.

“Flowers?” I suddenly remembered the image of an ibex walking past me the day before on my way back home from work, white petals sticking out of the side of his mouth.

“Yes the flowers in the garden. All of them. Suddenly gone.”

What had struck me most was his sardonic grin. Ibex are not known for expression of any type.

I shifted uneasily in my chair. “I don’t know.”

“It must be your friends,” she said, shooting me an accusing stare.

“Friends?” I replied innocently.

“Yes, the ibex.”

The thing is, you can’t really call the ibex your friends. Sure, I have a soft spot for them, and they humour my existence. I can walk among them and they accept me there. I have always seemed to have had a special connection with animals. As if they view me differently from my fellow humans. This may explain my lack of communication with people on a whole. For, when it comes to connecting to the human race, I am basically autistic.

My connection to the ibex has increased greatly over the years, especially as the dry winters forced them up from the wadi below to search for edibles on the outskirts of our community. I meet them each morning, as they breakfast on the greenery outside my office building on the edge of the wadi. And again, on my way home for lunch, while they are perched up on their hind legs trying to trim yet another circle from the bottom of the trees. But as summer wore on this year, their search for food has taken them further and further into our community.

And then, one day, it happened. I was standing out on the balcony, hanging up the laundry, when I saw them. There must have been about thirty of them, munching their way through two neighboring houses. One stood, with his mighty antlers, on the other side of the walkway, staring up at me. The ibex are great starers. They don’t even blink.

I shook my head and pointed back towards the wadi. “Don’t even think of it,” I warned.

I felt a little guilty saying these words. Here were these poor hungry ibex, who had been here far before this human community. Actually, not the exact same ibex, but you get my point. And all they wanted was to eat to survive.

Finishing with the laundry, I went in to check my mail. Soon I heard this weird crunching noise. Going back onto the balcony, I saw that about ten ibex had encroached onto our territory. A few were trying to create a diversion by seemingly munching on the grass, while others made their way to the much more promising garden at the back.

“No you don’t,” I instinctively called out, the thousands of years of genetically developed territorial imperative pulsing through my veins. I rushed down the stairs and shooed them away. They cantered back to the other houses and regrouped there.

They waited until I had gone into the house before making their way over again. Once again I shooed them away. But when it happened the third time - this time all thirty had made the move - I decided to give up. “Forces of nature,” I thought to myself. Who was I to deny them their means of survival. What was the garden, actually, other than another futile attempt to bottle up nature and make it our own trophy?

“Don’t you prefer it that way?” my wife would ask, pointing to the existence of the garden as we sat outside, reading.

“Yes,” I’d answer.

“Then stop complaining.”

And then, just as I had accepted their right to nibble our offerings, the whole herd of ibex suddenly stampeded their way past me back to the wadi. This was the first I had ever seen a stampede of ibex. They must have stumbled upon a neighbour’s dog. The ibex are a protected animal, but it appeared that they had overstepped their area of protection.

“So, that’s that,” I thought to myself. “In the end, all’s well that ends well.”

But now, a few days later, the flowers were gone.

“I’ll go down and take a look,” I said to my wife.

Despite the many green delicacies on offer, it appeared that they had only eaten the petals off of the flowers. Each and every petal, with only the stems remaining. I wondered whether the petals had added flavour, or whether the ibex were as frivolous for beauty as we were.

In the days that followed, I kept an eye on their progress. At the end of each day the stems on the plants were munched down even more. No matter their penchant for petals, the ibex didn’t seem to have much patience to wait for them to grow back. Life is just too short.

You might think that all this has significantly changed my relationship with the ibex. Well, either they have a short memory or they have forgiven me for my moment of betrayal in trying to shoo them away. For in the desert, a host honours his guests, no matter how they find their way to his abode. Live and let live. For the ibex, each new day is one of discovery, and for me, it is another opportunity to walk among them.