Transcendence of the Ego

In his book of this name, Satre - a most interesting-looking dude - differentiates between actions like "driving the car" and "writing" (why he puts these in speech marks is unclear) and 'purely psychical actions, like doubting, reasoning, meditating, making a hypothesis...'

There is, he claims, active consciousness, and then there is reflection, which is directed onto the consciousness. Obviously, being Satre, he tries to complicate this idea as much as possible and tie his readers' minds up like a cat's cradle on inexperienced but enthusiastic little fingers. (A taster: 'To these moments correspond concrete, active consciousnesses, and the reflection which is directed on the consciousnesses apprehends the total action in an intuition which exhibits it as the transcendent unity of the active consciousnesses.' This is easily conveyed compared to some of the ideas, but for a real challenge you should try 'Being and Nothingness': there are sentences in there that would win first prize in a 'Most Incomprehensible Collection of Words Ever to Form a Sentence' competition. Perhaps that's why his eyes went a little skewhiff.)

'Simply to be and to be aware of itself are one and the same thing for consciousness; nothing can act on consciousness because it is cause of itself,' he says. But the Ego is an object, and thus is passive, which means it is capable of 'being affected. The me, as such, remains unknown to us...The only method for knowing it is observation, approximation, anticipation, experience.'




The me remains unknown to us, and, if I might debunk his theory somewhat, only seems to become more and more so despite the observations, the approximations, the anticipations and the experiences.

Moving to another country is a wonderful way to transcend one's Ego. 'Transcend' sounds elevated and stately; 'stamp on with big boots' might be more precise. Ballasts of former self are removed. You walk around in the same body but something has been scraped out; pitted, cored, taken to a lab to be examined. No one really knows you, and apart from the closest person, no one really cares - not really. Going to London next week feels like being a rock-star and leaping off the stage in a heady dive: a crowdful of arms are there to catch me, hold me aloft over their heads, know me, love me, talk to me, keep me up and hope I won't go back onto the stage because they want me to stay there suspended and laughing like a loony in their arms.

I foolishly thought the blasting of the Ego was something we went through in youth: we can walk out of the life presented as the only real option; we can change our beliefs, have life-affecting, soul-enlightening experiences of near-death serenity and feel the force of life in its fullest but we get older and still parts of us get stripped away. Like a snake, a once integral membrane of who we are, a sheath of wafer-thin skin, is left on the dusty ground as we slither off, slightly raw.





This is probably a good thing. The Ego can become something we hide behind because we don't know what else there would be of us if we stepped out from behind it. A friend of mine is going to a women's groupy thing and one of the women there said to her, 'Why are you hiding behind cool?' This struck me somewhat. Being cool, being clever or beautiful or nutty or reserved or angst-ridden - these are edifices we construct when we're young: we dress in a certain way, we become walking embodiments of something we consider to be 'me', experiences shape us into a form. But clothes that look good on a nineteen year old don't translate well onto a sixty year old, so some essential aspect has to remain fluid, open and pliable.

'The problem with women,' my darling said to me this week, 'is that they change. Men don't change.' He said it as if that was a splendid thing. Maybe it is. It helps, I suppose.

Anyway.

On the Jerusalem roads this week we watched a policeman driving whilst talking on his mobile phone; a police van drive as close as he could behind me, flashing (the usual signal when someone wants you to move out of their effing way), which meant forcing me to drive faster than the speed limit in order to pass the car parallel to me and let him pass; a car that had crashed into the back of a bus in Gilo as buses just pull out after bus stops and don't care if there's a car in the lane already; I nearly got run off the road by a religious guy because he wasn't going to let me filter in front of him when I got in the wrong lane - he'd rather have crashed into me than let me get one over by getting in front of him. Arse. Traffic lights become gridlocked as drivers don't think about flow or other drivers on the road and I had this great idea that everyone here should be taught chess at school in order to THINK IN ADVANCE and plan one step ahead and learn that elusive and sublime thing everyone lacks called PATIENCE. Ahhh. Driving here is a war of truculence and you need full armour on, to hold your sword aloft, to have the heat of battle ringing in your ears before you pull out of your parking space. Hell. It's hell.

But it's quite fun if you're in a black mood and are a dab hand at rally driving. As I am. But most of the time it just gets you down. Man's inhumanity to man is the most baffling of all the illogicalities on this earth - just look at what's happening in Mumbai. Time to put my combat gear on - going to get the kids now.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Jerusalem at large

(Dawn view from our balcony. Sunset and sunrise the whole place has a translucent glow)


I realised a while ago that this blog is more about the meanderings of my mind than my meanderings through this holy city. That's because, as English Justine yelled at me on the phone last week, 'There's NOTHING more boring than Middle Eastern Politics' and also because a city is a city is a city and the convolutions of my head follow me wherever I go. That said, perhaps living in Jerusalem may well be interesting to someone who's never been to Israel and wonders what Jerusalem is really like.

Well...let's see. Jerusalem lies almost a thousand meters above sea level (which results in two exciting days of snow in winter, a hot but cooler than the sweaty swamp of Tel Aviv summer) and is mountainous. This rules out one of my crucial criterion of utopian living, which is to inhabit a place where I can cruise around on a mountain bike. Obviously mountain bikes were designed for precisely such terrains, but bearing in mind the gradient and size of the summit leading up to my house, even friends with bikes don't bother risking the future of their knees.

A law in Jerusalem means all buildings, from the new Waldorf Astoria ('The Palace') under construction near the family shop all the way down to local apartment blocks have to be covered with Jerusalem stone, which is a dusty yellow colour. This makes Jerusalem far, far more attractive than almost any other city in the world although, presumably, this applies to the buildings that were built after the law, as there are some monstrosities below my house that are square and diarrhoea red, and man, they really spoil the view.




The roads are narrow and poky, there are too many cars, the people drive like their wife's waters have just broken on their cream leather seats and they're really not happy about it and if you don't let them ram in front of you, they'll shoot you in the head and run you off the road. And that's every single time you get in the car. In fact, that would be a valid enough reason: what makes it worse is that there IS no reason to behave or drive like that - as though they own this road so just move over. I hate the pervasive 'Who are you, anyway?' (Mi ata bichlal?) attitude, which said in the correct way with a hand turned offensively upwards in your face, means don't go thinking you're something because you're a lowly piece of sh** and you need to know it.

The majority (I'm estimating wildly here) of residents are religious: mostly Orthodox Jews, but there are Arab towns sitting snugly in every valley (there's one below our house) and so there are many Muslims, plus Christian nuns and monks living in retreats and monastaries, Armenian and Ethipoian dudes with groovy beards plus coachloads of tourists wearing crucifixes and brighter trousers than they'd ever wear at home. Most religious Jews don't keep domestic pets and so all of them, from father and mother to children, are ridiculously and hysterically terrified of small, cute dogs. The good thing is, religious neighbourhoods may house families each with ten to twelve kids squished into three room apartments, block after block, but there isn't dog mess on the street. Litter, yes. But no doggy doo doo, and that's nice. Don't get me started on litter, though: the shores of the Sea of Galilee look like a dumping ground. Environmental awareness is as rare as good customer service.



I saw this dustsleeve of Infidels when I was about eighteen and asked Dad where this dusty, ancient-looking city was. I stared at it for ages and vowed to one day go there. Serves me right, really

Being a new country means the landscape and the infrastructure change in the blink of an eye. Cranes poke into the skyline everywhere you look; dust is ubiquitous, ditto rubble, ditto killer tractors and rumbling noises. We used to look at tractors and say, 'ahh, lookee the big yellow digger!' -they were friendly over-sized toys and farmish looking - but after the two Arab drivers of huge diggers turned them on buses and upturned cars, killing people downtown a couple of months ago, when we see a tractor, deathly fear ripples over our spines and the kids shout, 'Mum! Get out of its way, quick!' Sad, really.

My other criteria for a perfect location to settle down were:

1) It had to be cold in winter; cold enough for real fires and big jumpers. Tick.
2) Hot in summer, tick.
3) Nice friendly people would smile and say 'Good morning', cross.
4) A sea or lake nearby, cross.
5) A proper autumn with a blaze of orange and red leaves, cross.
6) Good healthy air and a clean, pure atmosphere to feel alive in. Big cross.

On the plus side, you can buy kosher food without it being limited to one small section of the supermarket with an insulting display of pickled cucumbers and Passover matzos. Shabbat is something special here, not another shopping day. There are lots of other Jews so you don't need to explain why you need Friday afternoon off or why you can't even GET in a car, let alone drive, on a Friday night.

I'm off to London in two weeks, so I can happily see the benefits of being here as the excitement taints my lenses and everything appears groovy. Let's see what dark substance unravels after I get back.

Or maybe not.



Next time I intend to visit sites of interest and somehow interweave pictures of them into my dissecting of life with a scalpel. I feel much better now, knowing the problems I have in life are justifiable and normal. Dealing with them, however - doing something about them - is another matter entirely.

Right Foot Forward

(This is from a site called 'Post Secrets', where people anonymously send in postcards revealing their innermost thoughts. Lots of them are pretty suicidal and I thought the site was inadvertently romanticising suicide so I don't look there anymore, but some of the cards are great.)

Leonie, I love you deeply. Thank you for your comment. The fact that you're now a plane ride away causes me huge grief. Of all the uncountable people I've known over the course of my lifetime (thus far), why did not one of us have the foresight to become a pilot?

So rather than mope, this week was do-something-about-the-situation week. I resolved not to stay at home alone with my computer humming at me but to be out as much as possible, so I planned to visit Sara from Leighton Buzzard, a close friend and fellow English convert my age, now at home in Beitar Illit looking after baby number eight; Justine, fellow Brit and revered career-woman looking after baby number one somewhere near the satellite station; Ruth the journalist for the Jerusalem Post (although meetings with her are best conducted with beer) and Tamar Toyoko from Japan, who works at the university library buying books on Judaism in Japanese. I planned to write, obviously, taking my laptop to either at the uni library or a cafe in Emek Refaim. This week would be completely different. I'd be out in the world and ready to feel alive. Except none of those events materialised because Maor was at home sick.

Tant pis, as they say in France. There were things I could do from home: I called the one serious Ulpan to ask about their January course, joined an online writers in Israel email list forum thing asking if anyone was interested in creating a book group for writers in Jerusalem, got nine replies - two from Tel Aviv saying they were sad I didn't live there, and one from England - and our first meeting is on Sunday night. I got offered a big website writing job (30-40 pages!) for a post production company and wrote the pitch/proposal for that, which I hope to get, and learned wonderful things about my own language from one of my students, Yair. Like that regardless and irregardless mean the same thing - a word and it's opposite have the same meaning! And irregardless is a double negative, which is just dumb, hence the dictionary recommendation not to use it.




(I love these flowers and have no idea what they're called. Anyone know?)


Jerusalem voted for a new mayor this week, leaving the street strewn with propoganda pamphlets and banners. I didn't vote (don't tell Emmeline Pankhurst or Linda the ex-and-now- anti-Haredi woman at work) because of a you-didn't-tell-me-that-paper-was-a-voting-slip, yes-I-did type scenario I won't go into. I'm so not into politics despite having an A level in it. But now I might start writing a blog for The Independent, which will be news-based and on Jerusalem, so I guess I should start reading newspapers and keeping abreast of current events and political matters. Oh man, excuse me while I yawn.





Wow, that's such a weird picture, i think I'd better post one of me looking a bit less like Shrek.




This week my aim is to start yoga but Tai Chi is calling me too. I loved standing and watching the pensioners in Japan doing Tai Chi en-masse in the park early in the morning or on my way home in the evening - it was like they were moving in slow motion and I was walking at the wrong speed, so I'd stop and be transfixed by them for ages, all moving in synchronicity, a hundred people doing a beautiful slow hypnotic dance.

I still felt pretty shite all week, to tell the truth, but other factors were involved in that and resolutions don't fall in one's lap in a plop. Next week I'm out and about and aim to have more fun. Anyone free and in a good mood, welcome.

Testing Times

There's a fight going on in my psyche between composed rationality and something threatening my equlibrium that's causing me unprecedented feelings of heaviness. It's been a year-long process, this struggle, and there have been times I've felt like I'm cracking under the strain of trying to be strong and level-headed and yet feeling like I'm treading water and sinking, no matter how much effort I put into staying afloat. I don't know if there's a breaking point to this or if it dissolves into a state of serene beatitude, but a friend I work with is a clinical psychologist and on Friday afternoon she said, given a five minute summary of symptoms, that it sounded like depression and suggested a good therapist and a course of medication. I raised an eyebrow - well no - I would have if I could, but I can't raise only one: I've tried and tried, much to the kid's amusement. They can all do it. Must be genetic via their father. I had to raise both eyebrows.

Now this is a good friend and she's only 28, but she said she felt so bad when she moved to New York to do her Masters, had just split with someone and everyone she loved was in Israel, so she took a course of some dopamine stimulating pill for about nine months, felt much better and came off them herself.

I've always derided the state of the world, of humans needing something to fill them and turning to medication; was stunned to find out half the mothers I knew in London were on Prozac and couldn't figure out why someone with a loving husband, a big house, sweet kids and no real problems in their lives could need something to get them through the day. Why? I figured for ages that it had to do with a lack of spirituality or depth, of not being in tune with the needs of their soul, or maybe that they wanted life to be one way and it was another, but hey - there are so many people in the world living in heinous conditions, there was perspective and it needed to be accounted for.






So my friend's suggestion came as a surprise to me. This Shabbat I read 'Passages' a best-selling psychology book of the Seventies that Mum bought me, as it explained the 'predictable crises' throught the passages of adult life. According to the author, this is all perfectly normal for a woman my age who has been a caregiver for years but now needs her own authenticating thing and finds she's been left behind somewhat or doesn't know where to start.


This made me feel better. She also stated 'intellectual starvation' as a very serious problem for a thinking person, and I realised that was and has been my problem all year. The one person I met here who I could have decent conversations with went back to Chicago in June and I'm so hungry for mental stimulation that I wrote to my former teacher, the great Sean Gaston, to ask if he thought I could tailor make a PhD including topics x y and z. He very sweetly said my email reminded him I was 'a gifted writer and whatever you do, I hope you will not forget the difficult and demanding world of fiction ... It also sounds as if you are on the path to becoming a philosopher, and I think this venerable tradition of religious meditation and philosophy an excellent and important place to direct your questing mind.' I could do the PhD with more luck in the US, he thinks, but unless I can find a correspondence course and/or a grant, it's not going to happen soon. If at all.






Should we just move back to Londres? This has been the question we've pondered for the last month or two. So many lives to consider now, so many issues to take into account it gets boring. Where did sponteneity go? When you have kids life takes on a new tilt.

Friends came over this morning; they moved to Jerusalem from Sydney a few months ago and are finding it tough. Bondi - say no more. They plugged the virtues of Oz and I had to agree - we rented a pad in Bondi, lived there for nearly a year and it was one of the most exhilarating times of my happy hippy traveller existence. Not that we're about to jump to Sydney, although my husband was into it. Anything but London. At least the sun shines in Bondi.






Depression is such a depressing word, don't you think? Sounds like someone's sitting on your head. Someone really overweight. I don't know what it is, this thing sitting on my happiness, but unless I find some friends to rap with, I'm going to have to make an appointment to see that shrink.

Big Foot

This week I decided that working in Israel will, at this rate, only make me enough money to last half the month if I'm outrageously tightfisted (which I'm not and hate being) so the only way to go is to make dollars and pounds abroad and spend them here.

Obviously this is optimism in its most pure and unadulterated form, but they claim in every new-age video and enlightening change-your-life-forever books that all you have to do to become the person you want to be is to think positively and make it happen because you are in charge of your destiny etc etc. This, I realised this week, is utter pants because (as yet) my lifetime's efforts of unmitigated positive thinking plus all the hard work and late nights in the world mean my one dream remains unfulfilled and I'm left wondering why exactly that is. I think I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what. I'm either on the wrong path and the right one will disclose itself at some stage (like maybe I'm supposed to be a philosophy professor and write academic works and fiction isn't my path at all), or I'm being too egotistical in my tone, or maybe I'm destined to save elephants instead or become my worst nightmare - a bank clerk - and I'm kidding myself otherwise. But that's negative and negativity will have no place in this blog, thank you.






So, I spent all week scouring the web for writing work, pitching myself (literally: 'Writer for sale' in the subject heading, then 'Well, for rent anyway'), flouting my talents and my experiences, tapping on keys and attaching samples of articles and essays and personal narratives on e.g. eyeliner and mothers in law to companies, magazines, online magazines, web profiles for creative freelance people, answering ads and offering every kind of service a girl can offer except the one that involves a red light and standing in a window in my undies.

Actually, in an unplanned digression, when we went to Amsterdam a few years ago (The Damage, as we fondly call it), our hotel room was opposite just such a window with a woman dressed scantily within it, so we couldn't help but check it out. She was pretty, the girl, and the window was huge; all kinds of people walked by - mothers with kids, old women, tourists chuckling, pointing cameras and staring, but she just behaved as though it was the most normal thing in the universe to stand in a large window in a bra, pants and heels in the middle of the afternoon, and I suppose in The Damage it is. She seemed vaguely bored, so she sat on a high stool and read a magazine from time to time or reapplied her make up. A guy would come along, scale the steps and knock on the door. He'd be let in and she'd go off for a few seconds and then reappear in the window. We figured she was the bait, the lure, and some old, hideous beast was inside, but once the men were in, the door was locked and they had to make do with whatever they were given or they'd be clubbed to death with a baseball bat. It was only a theory but what else could have been going on in there? Sometimes she went 'out back' but I think it was for a long awaited cup of tea and a visit to the bathroom. Not that I was looking that closely, obviously.

Back to the point of my story. And no, Amsterdam isn't worth visiting anymore - too many tourists and English beer drinkers and seventeen year old kids getting stoned in coffee shops, which was great when I was seventeen but a less attractive way to while away my time aged thirty five when I'm supposed to be mature and interested in other things. Maybe the museums are awesome but the queue is always so excruciatingly long, I gave up both times I visited and returned to the coffee shop. I mean, the guest house.

So, the point of my yarn today is actually the environment, believe it or not, because I did three more sample articles for Newser.com, the website that condenses articles to 120 words, and one of my offerings was, in a nutshell, this:

Twin Earth: In one generation we will need “two planets” to live on if we continue depleting resources at the current rate, according to the latest report by the WWF. The effects of pollution and deforestation along with world consumption levels ‘outstripping renewal’ threaten the planet’s future prosperity and will result in increased food, water and energy costs, writes Laura McInnis of Reuters.

Behaving like financial institutions, we seek ‘immediate gratification’ without considering the consequences, which are “even graver than the current economic meltdown,” and the WWF presses world leaders to treat the ‘ecological credit crunch’ with the same urgency. But there is hope: “If humanity has the will,” the report states, “it has the ways to live within the means of the planet.”

(Whether I get this job for Newser or not remains to be seen, but, as they say so eloquently in California, whatEVER.)






This coincided with an article I read on Shabbat in The New Yorker about our carbon footprint, which, interesting as it was, didn't leave me any the wiser as to how to be a better earth citizen. Tesco, Britain's superpower supermarket, wants to label all its food so consumers can see if it was flown in or how much energy was used in its production, which Tesco admitted was a naive task to set itself and was proving mightily difficult to measure and implement. Roses grown in Kenya and lamb from New Zealand actually damage the planet considerably less than roses from Holland or British baa-lambs due to the costs of heating and fertilizers respectively, so assuming locally produced goods are more sound is, actually, unsound. The New Oxford American Dictionary named 'localvore' the 2007 word of the year due to the hugely popular phenomenon of eating food from down the road.

Entering the stage, meet the ex-economics professors devising schemes for businesses to 'buy and sell the right to pollute' through reducing CO2 emissions in exchange for allowances they can then buy and sell, because businesses can't, apparently, understand anything unless it involves monetary gain. But the real problem are the forests - they're disappearing with such incredible speed that one of the two essential carbon sponges of the earth (the other being the ocean) will be lost in the time it takes to shout, 'Timber!' And when that happens, ecosystems will disintegrate, the atmosphere will lose its equilibrium and we'll all die of suffocation and starvation, so I suppose worrying about furthering my non-existent career is pointless and I may as well crack open a beer and enjoy the last traces of oxygen with my trusty hound.








'Put another way', says Michael Specter, who wrote the article, 'according to one recent calculation, during the next twenty-four hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same as if eight million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and flew en masse to New York.'

I was particularly outraged by Australia debating an additional tax on parents with more than two children - like it isn't expensive enough to have a gaggle of kids - all this coming from the land that, in order to boost its population, was instigating a baby boom when I was last there in 1993/4 by plastering cutesy pictures of babies on every ad to encourage broodiness. Doubledeckerbustardos.

So what can we do? Watching a plasma TV for three hours a day adds 250kg of carbon to the atmosphere every year - double that of an LCD TV, but apart chucking out the telly there was no real clue. We can reduce energy by insulating our homes, buying a new boiler and turning down the fridge, but unless governments pay farmers NOT to destroy their forests, buying local potatoes will be like sticking a band aid over a severed torso.

In England, I go to the supermarket armed with my 'Kosher Nosh Guide', then once I know something is kosher - and if I forget my guide this is a painfully long process of reading every label and calling an equally frum friend - I check how much sugar and fat it contains. Galit came over from New Zealand last year with a chart of E numbers to avoid and checked every ice cream before we ate it to see if it contained the nasties, and all the tastiest ones did, and now we need to be aware of how far food has flown or if it's production methods are going to destroy this beautiful world we're casually annihilating before my grandchildren have a chance to visit Niagra Falls or Masada. If shopping continues becoming this complicated, an hour in the supermarket is never going to cut it. If you're ever looking for me, I'm hunched over my trolley checking labels, and at this rate, I'll be in there for a while.

(For all of you who claim you want to leave a comment but don't know how, the way to do it is by clicking on the 0 comments in blue and just freeing your thoughts into the little box. As Jonathan Safran Foer says about writing: 'What's to know? You just let it out.' Go on. Make my day.)