Talmud and Dream Interpretation: Thoughts of a Secular-Cultural Jew

Talmud Readers by Adolf Behrman

“Dreams which are not interpreted are like letters which have not been opened.” Talmud

I am a cultural Jew, a secular Jew, an ethnic Jew. As singer Arianne Zuckerman once said, I am "Jew-ish". Yet, I revere the tradition of the Talmud. As far as I know, it is the source of a great wealth of pride in the intellectual strength and heartened closeness to tradition that Jewish people have maintained throughout generations. We have kept our traditions intact because we are flexible. The Talmud is a massive compendium of volumes steeped in argumentation, discussion, rhetoric and criticism on the sacred text of the Torah. The Old Testament is not Old, it is vivified by thousands of years of continuous self-criticical analyses and contemplative thought. The Talmud is the tradition of intellectual meditation on the sacred word. No wonder why dream interpretation is honoured, as the Talmud is one of the oldest forms of imaginative interpretation known in book form. For more in-depth understanding of this quote, see Erich Fromm's work "Forgotten Language."

__________

An old woman sits languorous outside the concert hall entranceway. Her excessive body weight slumps over a barstool with the heaping fatigue of an overworked heart. Yet, in her eye, there is a glint of sound reason, a harmonious vocation towards authentic humanity. I stop for a moment to share a few words with the curious and unseemly woman.

Woman playing a kithara by Anoniem
(Wall painting from Room H of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale)

I become so filled with sympathy for her life story. I run out onto the street, looking for a candy that I recently became aware that she enjoys. All I can find is a broken piece of chocolate on a dirty sidewalk. In my nervous frustration, I dust off the candy and walk back into the hallway. As I step cautiously through the alleyway to the concert hall, a man a few years my elder feels he must give a word of advice.

Two women at the street by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

"There is no sense in your sympathy," he affixes his language to my throat like the strangling inexorability of truth. "I've heard too many racial slurs from the mouths of your likening. You'd like to give back, and yet you cry on a pedestal," he musters an incendiary rage, of darkening complexion under the flickering streetlamp. "How many times have I heard your story, I'm Jewish, so I can empathize," he continues unalloyed. "And when you speak of G-d, I am utterly disgusted."

____________

The Italian connection, un-swayed by the prudent fire of tango nights
       stirring wilderness roosts
                in the back hall of some sterling porch façade
                in the mundane sky of an after-party dimming
                       beside alcoholic whiteout praise
                       and the ruined name.

excerpt from "The ruined name"

Call of the Sacred River: Pather Panchali and Dreams of Varanasi

Wife

"Let's go to Benares. Don't the orators make lots of money?"

Husband

"We can't go. How can we? This is my ancestral home; how can I leave it?"

Wife

"Why not? You were away eight years before. You left me at my father's and never wrote."

Husband

"Then I did not know you sweet you are."

Wife

"Save your compliments. This is my home, too. But look at it; it's like living in the forest. At night the jackals prowl around. There are no neighbours I can talk to. You are not always here and sometimes I'm so depressed. You won't understand these things. You live in your work. Sometimes you're paid, sometimes not. I had dreams, too, of all the things I would do.

Outside Their Door, An Old Lady Beggar Sings:

"Those who came before are gone / I am left behind, a penniless beggar / Day draws to its close, night's mantle descends / Row me across to the other side"

From the film, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road)

The same night I look back to Pather Panchali for a few words of wisdom on the experience of human dreaming, I coincidentally happened on the film, "Beyond" by NYC-based photographers Joey L. and Cale Glendening. The quote in the classic 1955 Bengali film Pather Panchali speaks to the luring effect that the ancient city of Benares commands, also known as Varanasi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. Indeed, it is impressive to see the holy tradition of sadhus depicted in the light of modern photographic excellence. The final scenes in Joey L.'s film are incredibly touching as a young sadhu teaches about how the world is made for peace, and all must be as the sun, seeing all beings as equals and offering the light of wisdom with an exuberant heart to all indiscriminately. Long Live Mother India! 

_________

As the world turns, dreams often fall into the abyss of earthly shadows and solar illumination 

The Jaws of Life by RK

We Are Not Above Extinction by RK

Light On The Little Road by RK

Bridge Under Serene Sky by RK

All Rivers Sacred by RK

__________

and silence, and nothing, and silence,
and how in silent searching , the wandering fades

a trespasser in the popular living happen-stance of  “honest” life,
stopped,
self-betrayed,
to tarry with biblical heat
and white-skinned eyes

paranoiac doom
in the aftermath of domestic civilization
...

calling back to the childless dream
Earth
...

returning from within
the simplest symbolic stare into the beaten human sigh
pointing downwards

upwards

west and east
with the surest of numbered lies,
telling children to fear death and bless the flesh with ungrateful ears, blocked
to the great mystery
that is not
that I am.

excerpts from "that I am silence"

Dreamtime and the Repatriation of Sacred Letters

Stencil art showing unique clan markers and dreamtime stories symbolising attempts to catch the deceased's spirit

"The source of the word alcheringa is Arunta, an aboriginal language of Australia. Sometimes translated as “the dreamtime,” it refers to a mythic world that existed at the beginning of time and continues to exist in our own time as a parallel world, revealing itself whenever we dream and whenever someone speaks or sings a myth." Dennis Tedlock, An Introduction to the Alcheringa Archive (From Jacket2, also on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics) 

In the first edition of "Alcheringa" a quote reads, "He who loses his dreaming is lost", attributed to "Australian Aborigine". In opening of the Autumn 1970 journal, the final "Statement of Intention" reads, "to combat cultural genocide in all its manifestations". That being said, it is curious to read such studies as that printed in the Australian Journal of Media & Culture (vol. 2, no. 1 1987), where an article by Vijay Mishra entitled, "Aboriginal representations in Australian texts" reads, 

Forgotten I lost dreaming
Country I left forgotten lost 

which is epigrammatieally reduced, by the translator T.G .H. Strehlow, to "He who loses his dreaming is lost," is directly related to a failure to perceive the radical difference between oral poetics (the fluid verse translation) and the wrillen text (the epigrammatic reduction). Obviously no one can maintain a total separation of the oral from the written.

Meanwhile, if one searches in the active publications of Australia's Central Land Council, an Indigenous repertoire of activism and scholarship dedicated to principles of sovereignty, there is a very interesting article on the Strehlow, the subject of lost attribution in Alcheringa's English translation from "Australian Aborigine"entitled, "The Strehlow collection of sacred objects" regarding further issues of repatriation, while focusing on the repatriation of sacred object collected by the modern anthropologist, as opposed, in the case of Alcheringa, the repatriation of sacred letters, collected by post-modern anthropologists of world literature.

Headgear worn during dancing (wood, human hair, kangaroo hair, feathers); Arrernte people, Australia

________

My mother visits her perception of my reality. North of here, it gets even colder, earlier, and winter is almost perpetual. I ask her exactly what her interests are. She is unresponsive. There are two streets that accommodate visitor appeal, with cafes and the like. We walk on the frozen sidewalk ground. A haze of white ice sheathes the panorama, compressing the moment into one look of sheer petrification. Walking down the main street, it seems as though no one lives here, the outside aesthetics are drab and unused, mere coverings for the inside hospitality, driven by weathered necessity. As we walk into a café, I realize I have enemies here. In the back hall, awaiting our hot teas, a youth of my age wrestles my muscles and joints in a twisted bout of unwanted pain. Unable to satisfy his need for violence, I ask that we exit the café, and so we return into the cold, sunless ache of our thirsting feet. 

Shoes (made from feathers and human hair); Arrernte people, Australia

Midway through the year, I go south to visit my father, to witness birth. With video camera in hand, I capture my contracting stepmother on the front lawn overlooking the St. Lawrence River. In great joyful upheaval, she cries, “it’s a boy!” as the body emerges. 

Ku-ring-gai_Chase - petroglyph, via Waratah Track (Rock is triassic Hawkesbury Sandstone, 220 million years of age)

That night, sitting lone by the coal-burning fire, I am visited by a presence. A naked Indian, greeting me with the power of a thousand friendships, unites in my melodrama with healing insight. He teaches me the power of the directions, North and South. The cold childless North of human danger and the impenetrable forces of nature, and the warm South of youthful diversion in the over-ritualized haunt of abundant fires. He reaches out to me, to plead with him for the stars to answer in earthly illumination. While with eyes closed, he recounts the bitter tales of repatriation, colonization and the staggering visions of post-genocide rehabilitation, for the entire world. And I wake, alone. The sun, directly overhead in a cloudless sky, is in full eclipse.

________

A presence belied in the soft air aglow with diligent drizzle
         From this, our American lighthouse heaven,
                 Alit with dream
                 in stories told by great-grandmother’s
                          Life lived outside the pages of the “true”
                                      And into the truly earth-quaking
                                      of dream

...

Men whose throats burn with the soil of their unloved mother
        Croaking up agro-fossil drains
                Reaching from modern skylines to prehistory,
                issuing from our Christ-death

...

In the housed mystery of our yet undiscovered world
        Beneath each colonial home
                Shot out of the ugly worldview
                        Misplaced over the moral genealogy

In an ecological philosophy
        To dry the eyes of our spectral hosts
               Who watch and wonder
                        With still unborn eyes

- excerpt from "With Still Unborn Eyes"

Blakean Spires Rise Toward Prehistoric Absolution

Elohim Creating Adam by William Blake

"We are shimmering scales on a snake which flies

 Which flies to the skies

 With a sacred surprise.

 We are feathers in wings

 We are the song which sings

 Of our common dream

 Sacred and sublime

 My breath is your breath

 I Share it with you

 Oh feathered snake

 Awake, awake

 We are ready to BE

 Aware of our divinity"

- excerpt from the feature “Meeting the feathered snake in the Cathedral of Nature” @ Lila.info a fantastic repository of Visionary Art, Contemporary Sacred Art and Outsider Art (permission granted for use)

_________

I read signs, undeniable and in my immediate vision before me. The signs foretell an oncoming fate of humankind with regard to energy resources. The future is a grim façade of a past latching on through the thinly laid dreams of a survivalist upon a bed of bloody nails, a failed magic trick. 

My vision clarifies with the acuity of a fish-eye optic nerve straightening over the bluff of a wide forest hill. The forest seems damaged, almost burnt, with an intense inbound potency of fear and isolation in every direction. 

I am as in the middle of another world, drowned in the trauma of unbridled change, a natural force looms, ever pervading, with another history, another worldview. I seem to move under the low hovering gray of sky when the tantalizing drip of adrenaline stirs in me. 

I feel a wolf near. This wolf seems more ferocious and starved than any I’ve imagined in the world before, this wolf eats human flesh. I move into a patch of dark grove, and with time edge my way off beyond the absolute wilderness of my strange, quiet surroundings. 

Human song echoes across the abandoned suburban neighborhoods. The sounds are of the nature of prayer, chanted and primal. I begin to see smoke rising from a hut made from animal hide and forest wood. 

As I approach, the scene quickly turns into an entirely new mode of experience outside the pale of a direct relationship with the bald face of nature, alone. Human interaction stirs a Medieval predilection. 

As I near the inhabitants of the small family camp, two of my friends soon appear behind me. With swords in hand, we face off with the camp’s inhabitants. My friends are quick to be aggressive and violent, however I seem to be the most nimble with a sword and quickly disarm them so as not to harm the innocent people of the camp. 

There is an air of blind unconcern for any solace in humanity, there is only bare personal need and pack mentality. I saunter off with my friends, who wonder about leaving me behind based on my insubordination, then to their ultimate liking accept me as one of the most skilled in the group. We walk through a completely emptied, silent suburban neighborhood. Once affluent, the residents have long since abandoned this obsolete way of life.    

_______

An outside view 

abundant hovels of eastern North America

"speak!

of a history that cowers with tragic hesitation

in a sick thirst for music

to transform the silent yawning of a near-frozen despair."

On the brink of waterless hours,

the people will their fasting into the deep, 

alone night of elderly decay.

Before the horizon, 

hill dwellers form their beliefs

by the norms of a faraway country.

Inside their habitations,

a strong light pulls warped wooden walls

and shrill metallic roofs

into sporadic gusts

Winds brew utter derangement

before the awe of a clear restitution.

- beginning excerpt from "A Fix in the Mourning"

Statement of L. Caruana

Pandora by Odilon Redon

"Through the endless interplay of art, myth, and dream - and the underlying 'image-language' that they share - I have come to see life as a gradual unfolding of the Sacred.
At night, we speak a more ancient language. During the day, our thoughts are guided by our spoken language, as words fall into subject and predicate arrangements. But in dreams, we think in a much older way, as images fall into enigmatic arrangements which are nevertheless recognizable to us through ancient myth and sacred art."

- L. Caruana

Sanctuary of Natural Habitat

The Dream by Henri Rousseau 

Immediate falling into dream-state upon closing eyes, dropped into a fantastic supernatural forest grove, a natural sanctuary, putting me into a space and time where people lived comfortably through archaic millennia of presence in their natural habitat, knowing of those safe havens where creatures give way to an ethereal energy, the light appears as high-contrast film, there is another being who lets me know where I am and its importance, a sacred realm in nature, experienced through mind's nature

Fri, May 6, 2011