Between Propaganda & Escapism

Between Propaganda & Escapism by Lonnie Monka

A single microphone, mounted on a stand, stood on a small stage. A little over a dozen people gathered at the Besarabia, a tiny dive bar with tons of eastern-European flare, located in a basement corridor in Jerusalem. The fact that anyone came was a surprise. Besides being a Sunday night, the first and maybe only snow flurries of the season sprinkled on and off. The flakes weren’t sticking and there were no biting winds outside, but the mere sight of snow is enough to keep people in Israel bundled up at home. For such a worldly people, Israelis tend to have a remarkably Middle Eastern sense of winter. Those people, who had left their warm homes to congregate in those murky conditions, were brought together by that microphone.

I was hosting another Jerusalism open mic poetry event, the third one since the beginning of the war. Hoping to draw some vitality from literary precedents, I chose the name “All Poets Welcome” for these events, adopting the title of a book by Daniel Kane that I had read for my doctoral research. Kane himself chose the name as a throwback to a 1960s reading series in New York City which also bore the same name and stood at the heart of his study. The local poetry scene in Jerusalem, I figured, could use a little bit of passionate, old-school literary principles of openness and inclusivity. Trying to revive a strain of 1960s New York City culture within the context of 2020s Jerusalem promised as much inspiration as it highlighted differences.

In my opening remarks, I tried to tease out the tension between historical depth and a clear awareness of our present situation. I wanted to share a short passage by the famous Canadian-American author, Saul Bellow but, first, I needed to explain the context. In 1976, the same year that he won the Nobel Prize for literature, Bellow participated in a literary residency in Jerusalem, organized by the then-mayor Teddy Kollek and hosted at Mishkenot Sha’ananim. I explained to that audience of eager open mic poets that Bellow had written a book about this visit, a kind of travelogue, titled To Jerusalem and Back.

I was drawn to the book, at first, to learn about Bellow’s meetings with early English-language poets of Jerusalem—namely Dennis Silk and Harold Schimmel. Today’s English-language poets of Jerusalem, I hoped, would be equally interested in Bellow’s meetings. They remind us that, since the founding of the modern state of Israel, there has been a small but steady stream of English-language poets seeking out local literary experiences. I was trying to remind everyone at that bar that we were an extension of this modest tradition.

One of my favorite local authors, Haim Watzman, often points out that what brings people to Israel is not what keeps them here. Similarly, returning to Bellow’s book in the midst of this ongoing war, I was less struck by the stories of past English-language poets in Jerusalem than I was by the odd historical parallels between Jerusalem in the mid 70s and Jerusalem today.

Bellow had arrived only a few years after the Yom Kippur War, another surprise attack during the haggim. Israelis claimed a victory but only in the sense that they had reasserted themselves as a capable military force not to be tested. Yet, that achievement was blunted by the paradoxical realization that we had lost. In part, this disillusionment stemmed from the realization that, along with the state’s continuance, security security concerns would compound. Visions of peace were disappearing into the horizon. Today, we are still in the thick of it, but it seems like we are headed towards a similar outcome. We wait for the coming victory, a victory erected on a foundation of irrepressible loss.

Bellow had recorded and reflected on daily encounters with a range of local and international figures he met in Jerusalem—politicians, intellectuals, activists, writers, etc. So many of the arguments and explanations are eerily similar to the issues discussed today. When I first read the book, the political and historical anecdotes and commentary seemed more tiresome. Now, they came into sharp focus, as a sense of our approaching a post-Yom Kippur War moment deepened. This historical sensibility, though, is not what I wanted to share with those poets. I was moved to share a passage that ponders an aesthetic literary experience emerging despite feeling enmeshed in the torrents of history. The passage, I hoped, would frame all of their readings and, perhaps, send them off with a few sparks of inspiration.

One of Bellow’s stories recounts his meeting a librarian, who escorted Bellow to the basement of a library in Jerusalem’s Greek Quarter, where rare illuminated manuscripts were held. The librarian explained how the dark, humid conditions of that basement happened to be ideal for storing those sensitive materials. Bellow was seduced. He recounted how an immense desire arose in him, a desire to sit in that basement with those books for an eternity. In response to that desire, the following thoughts unfolded, which I shared in hopes of stirring the hearts and minds of those poets at Besarabia, themselves sitting in a cold basement, waiting with their own manuscripts in hand.

The origin of this desire is obvious—it comes from the contrast between politics and peace. The slightest return of beauty makes you aware how deep your social wounds are, how painful it is to think continually of nothing but aggression and defense, superpowers, diplomacy, terrorism, war. Such preoccupations shrink art to nothing. (To Jerusalem and Back, Viking Press, 1976: 94)

In the midst of those dizzying political conversations which, to his outsider perspective, mostly appeared like narrow-minded rationalizations to tragically try to push through a stalemate, Bellow had this simple, quiet experience of—none other than—beauty. The ambiguous second person here opens up questions about who is feeling which social wounds but, at least for those of us at Besarabia that night, it was clear that he must be talking about Israelis. The point being that our social wounds make it nearly impossible to dwell in an experience of beauty. Yet, even if the experience is short-lived, Bellow’s words illustrate how beauty can emerge in the delicate cracks of an endless conflict, or, in his situation, which playfully mirrored ours, beauty can be found in a damp basement.

Reading this passage today, it seems like a warning against the pervasive, engulfing feeling of needing to explain. Because of the internet and, especially, social media, reporting of events is massively dwarfed by people explaining what happened. The narrative spin seems more important than the event itself. You’d think that the internet could enable the ultimate transmission and discovery of the truth but, instead, it compels us to develop our truths—i.e. to explain ourselves. The negative connotations of propaganda come to mind but, here in Israel, we soften the feeling of instrumentalizing information by calling it hasbara. I appreciate some people’s efforts, engaging in this explanatory work. Moreover, I have come not only to expect it from our enemies but, sometimes, to marvel at their propagandizing prowess.

Reading Bellow’s remarks doesn’t dismiss the need to explain but simply exerts the idea that beauty—i.e. art, literature, poetry, etc.—are diminished by submitting to the influences of this function. Life is filled with aesthetic experiences, such as marveling at snow flurries which, if it were a little bit colder, could speckle the streets of Jerusalem. Reflecting on the aesthetic experience leads thoughtful people to realize that a beautiful sight of snow can be rich with potential meaning but it explains nothing. Thus Bellow reminds us, especially those of us writers and artists in Israel, that beauty doesn’t explain anything. In a world of rational politics, the idea of explaining is a worthy ideal. In the world of art, the act of explaining treads on slippery rhetorical slopes, as well as tired poetic tropes.

The poems of Nelly Sachs come to mind, as a counter-argument to Bellow’s aesthetic yearning. One of the main, chilling motifs of that famous Jewish-German-Swedish poet and Holocaust survivor, was chimneys. Thinking of a snow-covered pastoral scene, the sight of smoke pouring out of chimneys can offer a rich experience of beauty. It’s easy to be moved, emotionally, by the contrasting brisk cold and the smell of an out-of-sight fire, presumably warming people in their homes. Sachs’ poems, though, insist on the gory reminder of the chimneys across Europe that spouted out remnants of incinerated Jewish bodies. The same smoke, which joins the very air that an observer of such a scene breathes, can be both beautiful and deeply disturbing. Perhaps this kind of poetry, which evokes new historical facts, can aim to be art while subverting this aesthetic experience of beauty.

This tangential thought about Nelly Sachs did not occur to me that night at Besarabia. Instead, when addressing those poets eager to read, I pointed to an adjacent concern—namely, that Bellow’s ideas might appeal to escapism. His proposition, in other words, that indulging the desire to explain “shrinks art” suggests a troubling corollary: Enlarging art justifies ignorance. I still don’t have a good explanation but it seems clear that Bellow’s thoughts about beauty do not aim to promote willfully indifferent flights of the imagination.

In retrospect, an awkward but illuminating fact revealed itself to me as I was spinning off these thoughts in that less than impressive situation. Relative to concerns about escapism, the more or less debased state of poetry is an asset. In other words, escapism can’t explain the motivation for a loosely connected group of poets to congregate on an uncomfortably cold winter evening. Surely the endless possibilities to stream movies and shows, while comfortably smothered by blankets in their own living rooms, was as available to them as was the ability to spend that evening in a cozy office chair, using phones and computers to promote their perspective on the internet and fight the good fight as social media warriors. There must be, I insisted to those poets, a middle way between explanation and aloofness, between propaganda and escapism. I offered them this tension as a frame, through which to experience that evening’s readings but also to take home with them as they continue this seemingly antiquarian practice of composing poems.

Following these lengthy introductory remarks, I started to read the names on the sign-up list. One by one, these poets stepped onto the stage and took the microphone. So many factors separated us from the New York City poetry readings whose name we had borrowed. Yet, in their spirit, I was happy to have my scholarly high-brow sensibilities tampered. Some poems were hermetic and complex, while others were unabashedly simple. Some poets were loud and confident and others timid and quiet. They oscillated, mostly, between sadness and humor. I was enamored by this quirky array of poems that included the following highlights.

Obsessing over oval-shaped cars. Speculations about single people, increasingly pained by not finding a mate as they age, suffering due to a divine sense of judgement. A memorized recitation of passages from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Existential angst explored through the image of a frog. A list of antisemitic reasons one poet supposed that he had been ejected from various social media groups. Litanies using single word refrains to start each line, such as “because,” becoming a reflective poem of because this, and because that, because, because, because…

The most surprising thing I heard, more than once, was poets prefacing their poems with warnings. They felt compelled to let the audience know that they were about to hear a “war poem.” Perhaps they were sensitive to the possibility of triggering members of the audience. Perhaps they were concerned that the complex language and imagery might not clearly come across when heard instead of read. Whatever the reason, I was deeply satisfied by my own response to one of those warnings. My stand-up comedy instinct suddenly kicked in and, sitting in the audience, I yelled out: “No need to warn us about the war, we’ve all already been properly prepped.”