A Cage Went in Search of a Bird

"Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted." - Franz Kafka

I've been working in Israel for three weeks now.  I have learned the value of paying attention by putting my own reactions and feelings aside. Without understanding what is going on around me, there is no way I can work for positive changes here, and the best way to do that is quiet down, sit still, and listen.

In that spirit, here is a cocktail blender drink of the experiences I remember most.

I stood with Muslim and Christian Arabs and tourists on the harbor dock at Old Jaffa, watching the sunset.  There were families all around me, and everyone was quiet, even the babies.

I went to the border of Jordan in the Golan Heights, and the only person whose eyes I could meet and whose eyes would meet mine was the 19 year old soldier with whom I lunched on olives and pita and coke.  He spoke admiringly of Bedouin trackers working for the military, joked about animals triggering the border sensors, and looked relaxed and confident. He carried a machine gun, like the other soldiers I've seen.  A United Nations van pulled up and seven men exited, five of whom unrolled prayer rugs and performed their midday prayer towards Mecca.

There was a little swallow nest at the small shawarma shop where a suburban Jewish Israeli family and I stopped, owned by Palestinian Arabs.  I was terribly hungry and the swallows were silent, flying back and forth to feed their young. We (the Arabs, the Jews, and I) were also quiet while we waited.

I visited a 16th century Jewish bakery in Tzfat, recently unearthed and in the process of being excavated. They pointed out the tiny skylight in the corner of the Mikva (ritual bath), where they had entered the place after so many years.  It smelled like river stones and dry earth.

I had jet lag for two weeks, and heard the birds that sing in Tel Aviv at dawn as a result. There are different stages of birds, and the last birds of morning are swallows, which have a sad, distant cry, even though they are right next to the window.  The first ones, who sing when it is still dark, sound like Kurt Vonnegut's birds from Slaughterhouse Five: po-tee-weet?

I ate lunch with my co-workers on a trip to Tzfat at a Yemeni cafe, where an old man with a white beard cooked the most perfect food, a little like crepes with freshly made Za'atar, goat cheese, vegetables, and smothered in new olive oil.

I saw graffiti on a corporate building in Tel Aviv.  It said, across the whole building, "WHOSE STREETS?"  I saw other graffiti art, anarchy symbols, bits of poetry, racial slurs against Arabs, drawings of women and rabbits and popular cartoons.

Independence Day in Israel was a big outdoor party.  Everyone was walking down the middle of the streets, there were singers and electronic music on stages in Rabin Square, children were screaming and playing. I went to an alternate event, where protestors from the Occupy movement in Israel last summer came out and spoke, and lit torches together.  There were teachers, artists, journalists, photographers, and social workers.  They smiled at one another, but there was no joy, no dancing.  Afterwards I walked through the streets filled with people dancing and laughing and spent the entire rest of the night reading "I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity" by Izzeldin Abuelaish. I read the last sentence as Vonnegut's birds were beginning to sing.

I sat in Old Jaffa in the mid-afternoon sun, listening quietly to a Russian man playing folk songs on his guitar, in the shadow of one of Jaffa's elegant minarets, while sailboats glided through the blue Mediterranean Sea and the sea wind blew steadily from the west.

I saw a medical researcher's laboratory in Tzfat, and the large, empty faculty of medicine, where many Jews and Arabs will study together to save people's lives someday.  The faculty is new and kept echoing.  I kept on thinking I heard voices all around me, but there was no one except for us.

I saw the tiny neighborhood of Achbara, at the southernmost section of Tzfat, a beautiful Arab village, very pastoral, with goats and horses and cows, and a pine forest around it, with a view of the mountain bridge to the main township, and a mosque with a golden dome and its soaring white minaret in the very heart of the neighborhood.

There's more, of course.  The human mind and its animal and philosophical tendencies, and its mystical inclination to describe the indescribable and so gain power over all it perceives, is the cage, and all the ghostly dreams it solipsistically encounters along its way are the birds. But the key to open the cage exists, though it's hard to find.

This is where we begin.

Eden

The Day of Remembrance

"War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I arrived in Israel the day before yesterday.  Tel Aviv sounds different, smells different, tastes different; all the delicious indicators that I am far away from home are all around me.  I am overwhelmed by work almost immediately, but I do have an unexpected respite.  Today is Israel's Memorial Day, Yom Hazikaron, the day Israeli citizens honor fallen soldiers and victims of (Arab) terrorism.  It is a very nationalistic day, and concentrates some of the problematic dimensions of nationalism.  Israel has adopted a position that recalls in some ways, to my mind, the McCarthy era in the United States.  Criticism of the government is equated with the delegitimization of the State of Israel, thus any questioning of government or military action can be seen as treason.  This is not to say that Israel has become paranoid to the point of brutally silencing dissenting citizens, as in the case of Argentina's desaparecidos, but this constraint on opposition, this culture of suppression, is a feeling that circulates within the mainstream into all arenas of life in Israel.  A co-worker of mine attended an event by an organization for nonviolence, "Combatants for Peace," yesterday, which memorialized both Israeli and Palestinian victims of the conflict, recognizing government and terrorist activities on both sides that killed innocent people.  Israel Today's headline was: "Radical Leftists to honor Palestinian terrorists on Memorial Day."

Yesterday, we had a special presentation, in which several texts from Israeli military personnel were read and analyzed, and a discussion followed.  The one that struck me the most was written in 1956, by Moshe Dayan, who first served in an early Jewish militia known as the Haganah, and who would eventually serve as Chief of Staff under David Ben Gurion, in 1953. Dayan was baldly straightforward about what needed to be done in order to secure a state of Israel for the Jewish people, and throughout his career openly expressed uncertainty about the defensibility of what he was participating in.  He said that his tactics were "effective, not justified or moral but effective," and he was responsible for the deaths of many innocent and unarmed Palestinians, and instrumental in the creation of the State of Israel, and to the relative safety of two million Jews, most of whom has nowhere else to go, themselves under violent siege.  Dayan wrote, at his funeral oration at the death of a young Israeli farmer at the hands of a Palestinian Arab:

"Let us not today fling accusation at the murderers.  What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us?  For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.  We should demand his blood not from the [Palestinian] Arabs of Gaza but from ourselves.."

Yesterday, Dayan's words taught me the perspective of terror.  When you are fighting for your life, you can either demolish the enemy and their children, or you can lay down and die with yours.  This is the perspective human beings gravitate towards when they live suffused in an atmosphere of unrelenting danger, an atmosphere that Israel has never completely extricated itself from.

For all I know, this perspective is true.  I come from a life within a privileged bubble where war has not yet touched. Perhaps there really is no other choice other than to kill your enemy or allow yourself to be killed. I can't really say.

Nevertheless, my feeling is that it's a lie told to us by throwback human instincts and emotions from a time of ancient tribal survival.  I don't think there really is any enemy.  Dayan later went on to say, "without the steel helmet and the gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house," but I am increasingly sure that, whether or not a displaced people had to build their future that way, none of us today may build our future that way. That house is made of the bones and blood of all of us.

I am searching for a solution, or at least the components of one, here.  The dialogue continues.

Eden

Søren Kierkegaard at 3 AM, or, How I Passed the LEED for Neighborhood Development Professional Accreditation Exam

"The truth is a trap: you can not get it without it getting you; you cannot get the truth by capturing it, only by its capturing you." - Søren Kierkegaard, Journal Entry, 1854.

Sometimes when I can’t sleep I pick up my “Journals and Letters of Søren Kierkegaard.”  He is my favorite philosopher.  I can’t necessarily say that he has written my favorite books on philosophy (it’s difficult to top the beautiful mind food found within Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” or the gloomy appeal of Sartre and his avid solipsism, or Neitzsche’s elegant and sometimes mean-spirited logic in “Ecce Homo” and “The Twilight of the Idols.”)  Nevertheless, Kierkegaard remains my favorite, the best loved, which is why I adore the intimacy of his “Journals and Letters.”  His inner conflict over his theology, his interpersonal relationships, his vehement and often passionate expression of the collection of ideas that eventually won him the title Father of Existentialism, all make him the most human of the philosophers.  I admire his doubt, his confusion, and his brilliant articulation of the train of thought (rather than presenting his reader only with an ostentatious display of philosophic conclusion, as Kant was used to do).

Kierkegaard, in fact, was very straightforward about his conviction that the only valid perspective on the world is that of subjectivity.  There is such a thing as objective fact, truths that are common to us all and universal laws that can be applied across space and time, but these truths cannot be discovered or understood with any tools greater than the outer limits of the small and inherently biased human mind.  “Subjectivity is Truth,” wrote Kierkegaard.  “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”  For him, there existed no worldly authority that could be trusted.  Objective truths could not by themselves contribute meaning to human life.  Meaning existed only within an interpersonal relationship to truth.

So, I’ve been studying for the LEED for Neighborhood Development exam this past month, and I passed the exam on March 29^th.  The exam consists of knowing the information contained in the U.S. Green Building Council’s elephantine Reference Guide for the Neighborhood Development rating system: about 600 pages of the concepts, calculations, referenced standards, and exhaustive instructions for professionals trying to achieve project certification for a neighborhood development.  USGBC's reference guide covers major principles for sustainable community development, and the rating system awards points for high density in residential and nonresidential buildings, mixed income housing, mixed-use neighborhoods, energy efficient buildings and infrastructure, and for projects located on previously developed land and near public transit.  There are a myriad of other factors, including urban agriculture, habitat conservation, and even criteria concerning accessibility for the disabled.

Not only am I not terribly skilled at memorizing numbers, but, unlike the majority of folks who take a LEED AP exam, I have never worked in the building industry.  I’ve mostly worked with communities to develop green infrastructure, through nonprofits, local park authorities, and small green engineering firms.  I’m sure that someone who is good with numbers could pass simply by memorizing the entire quantity of factual information contained within the reference guide, but he or she would be spending roughly twice the amount of time necessary, and, in my opinion at least, memorizing exactly the kind of data that you can simply look up once you are on a LEED project team.  Happily, as it turns out, Kierkegaard told me exactly how to pass this exam.  None of the facts I was supposed to know for the exam had any meaning by themselves; once I understood the underlying reasons for the standards, point allocations, and specifications of the Neighborhood Development rating system, the details stuck relatively easily.  I had to think like the authorities at USGBC, who came up with the rating system, to study successfully and pass.

Therefore, in the stressful week leading up to the exam, all the nights I couldn’t sleep and was up in the dark, reading my Kierkegaard, I was actually subconsciously hatching a plan to pass the exam.  Subjectivity is Truth, and only through finding meaning that connects the facts can there be a real proficiency in the LEED rating systems.  And it’s the kind of knowledge that sticks, too, instead of dissolving into disassociated numbers and words the minute the test is over.  Pre-test anxiety is just another tool to use, if it can be understood as freedom to make the facts fit the story of how and why they have meaning.  Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, and when your head stops spinning, you open your eyes and find success beyond your most distantly cherished wishes.  It's true.

Eden

The Fool

"Just think, they never sleep!’‘And why not?’ ‘Because they never get tired.’ ‘And why not?’ ‘Because they’re fools.’ ‘Don’t fools get tired?’ ‘How could fools get tired!’ –“Children on a Country Road," Franz Kafka

I have had an interesting jumble of jobs and education during my life so far: ranging from art student to art model to art teacher, farmhand to gardening assistant to environmental policy advocate, English lit major to journalist to researcher.  Since I graduated with my master's degree in landscape architecture from Cornell in 2010, I've been working as a consultant in green infrastructure and community planning.  Now I'm gearing up to apply for UC Berkeley's doctoral program in City and Regional Planning at the end of this year.

I now have less than thirty days before I depart for three months' work in Israel, to work with the Reut Institute, a nonprofit, non-partisan policy group that advises the Israeli government, advocating for non-violence and social justice.  I'll be working on several projects in the ancient town of Safed, in the northern Galilee.  The town will be a case study of techniques for inclusive economic growth through sustainable neighborhood planning, historic preservation, and integrative urban design.

I've become involved recently in Occupy Wall Street.  I was in New York City in mid-November, and was there for the NYPD raid on Zuccotti Park, and the march over the Brooklyn Bridge a few days later.  I took pictures and shared my experience over Twitter, where the BBC found and contacted me for several broadcast interviews.  I then went to Occupy Congress in D.C. in January, and have been variously involved in Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco.  This involvement was a big factor in my work for Reut in Israel, which is extremely interested in the Occupy movement, and in addressing Israel's own problems with poverty and income gap.  Being part of OWS was an incredible, life-changing experience.  I've never been an activist before, never experienced that kind of immediate sense of community before, never felt so sensitive to the intellectual and emotional tides of a crowd before.  Being part of OWS expanded my identity, taught me more about individual power, and gave me a whole new perspective on the systems of our society and our different systems of authority in the United States.  I both lost and found faith in people, and in myself.  I hope to be able to effectively apply what I learned from OWS to my upcoming work in one of the most complicated countries in the world.

My thoughts about the state of Israel are likewise complex, and I'll talk about that more in a different post.  Right now I'm learning as much as I can about the situation and history of the country I'll be working in.  Israel contains religious and secular Jews from around the world, Palestinian Muslims and Christians, Bedouins, and a dramatically increasing number of immigrants, including Sudanese and Vietnamese refugees, Gypsies, and many others.  There are some parts of Israeli history and the policies and practices of the Israeli government that I find objectionable.  That's all right.  I do believe that change comes both from without and from within; you cannot change a system that you refuse to become involved in, and you also cannot truly effect change without the perspective of venturing outside of mainstream society, where creative thinking bends the rules every day and where revolutionary thought, a nebula of destructive and generative force, forges new constellations of human progress.

An Atlas is both a series of maps and a Greek God, hoodwinked into supporting the sky on his shoulders for all eternity.  I am a mapmaker by profession, showing cities as they are, as they were, as they might be, and I am an admirer of the god Atlas, who knows as well as I do how very heavy the world can be.

Eden