"Body and Soul"

David Grossman, David Albahari, Ed Sanders, Veroniki Dalakoura, Gary Younge  (moderator)




Gary Younge: Hello, and welcome to another conversation at the Prague Writers' Festival. The theme for this conversation comes from Wittgenstein: "Perhaps the best image of the human soul is the human body." To discuss this we have Ed Sanders, David Grossman, David Albahari, and Veroniki Dalakoura. My name's Gary Younge, and I am the New York correspondent for the Guardian. Now, I want to start by asking David Grossman, whether this quote-this description of body and soul-speaks to him in any way, as a Jew who lives in Israel and has to navigate through the state, the spiritual and the physical. David?



David Grossman: Shalom, and good evening. Yes, of course it's significant to me as a Jew. In the last two thousand years, almost until fifty-eight years ago, the Jews did not have a place of their own-a room of their own in the world. Lands of their own, an army to defend them, a great culture, a flag, all the symbols that create this illusion of concreteness, of a national body - were not ours.



Throughout our history we were regarded by others-by the non-Jews-as a symbol for something else. A Jew was never a person, per se. He was always a symbol. We were demonized or sometimes even idealized, but were not allowed, until we had the state of Israel, to have this solidity of existence-as a people, as a state. The strange thing is that now that we have the state of Israel, we still do not truly feel at home. Israel is our fortress, maybe, but not our home, because there are other people who have some claims on this country. There is only one clear border for us; this is the sea on our west. Until now, we did not create borders.



Younge: Ed, America's had a fairly stable sense of home for the past fifty years. There's a concrete sense of its body, but less sense of its soul. Do you think that's fair?



Sanders: America has a soul-a complicated soul. There is an America whose soul is in the laboratories of Dr. Jonah Faulkman, who's working on a way of curing cancer by strangling the blood supply to tumors. He's part of the soul of America. There's a professor in the Midwest who's worried about the water supply for his town and is trying to prevent over-development. He's part of the soul of America. There's a mother with an abusive husband trying to reach out to the local shelter for support. She's part of the soul of America. America's a very complicated thing. The right wing has for now taken control of the United States, both in the government and in the media, but the soul is able to shine out and communicate with the universe. There are many beautiful things about America, in spite of the fact that it tends to bomb other countries. That's the military-industrial-surrealists. They don't have a clear sense of reality. It's mainly men, grumpy old curmudgeons whose Viagra is smart bombs that fly through the air and then come down and destroy your village. I apologize for my nation for its violence, but I don't apologize for its jazz and its poetry and its painting, its open spaces, its beauty, its sense of wilderness - this is its soul.



Younge: David, coming from Yugoslavia, where the body pretty much fell apart, is it something that you yearn for, a sense of home-in terms of the home you've lost?



David Albahari: When the formal Yugoslavia began falling apart, many people felt that they were actually losing their bodies at that time. Sometimes I feel like I have five bodies because I feel okay in each of these new countries, but there are people who don't. I think it's normal. Each one of us should have his or her own soul, his or her own body. My own body decided to leave. But this was not my first thought when I began to think about the body and the soul. My first thought was something from Hebrew mythology. In Hebrew religion, angels have no joints in their body, so they cannot sit. Of course, we are not angels.



Younge: Speak for yourself.



Albahari: Okay, sorry. I'm not an angel.



Younge: Veroniki, is it important to have a sense of home?



Veroniki Dalakoura: For such an eternal subject, I believe that there are only perceptions and sensibilities. There is not a fixed answer.Many times we're trapped in our body, and many times we're trapped in our soul, but it is difficult to feel the difference.



Younge: If I could just interject my own story: As a black person from Britain, I grew up with people telling me that I wasn't from Britain, even though that's where I was born. And then when, on a fairly mundane and regular journey to find a sense of home, I went to my parents' island in the Caribbean, they, of course, told me that I was English. In some ways this search for home allows me to be a visitor in lots of places. It's a mixed blessing, if you like. David, do you agree?



Grossman: Yes, being a writer is being an outsider everywhere - sometimes even in my own family, even in my own home. It's not something that I chose, it's how you're born, though it is not always pleasant. Freud, Schoenberg, Marx were visitors, as well.



I want to return to what David Albahari said about the angels who had no bones. There is a little bone in the end of our backbone called a luz, and this bone-according to Jewish belief-cannot be eradicated by any means. After a person dies, if you tried to burn it, to crush it-it would remain. In this bone the essence of our being is preserved. From this bone a person would be resurrected in Doomsday. You know, in a Jewish temple, only the high priest could open the holy of holies. When he opened it alone, do you know what he saw? There were two angels, a female and a male angel, making love very passionately!



Albahari: Well, that's what soul is all about.



Dalakoura: I was thinking that angels do not have sex.



Grossman: Not Jewish angels.



Albahari: Although there's a problem if they don't have all those joints in their body so-but we will leave this for next year, when we get together again.



Younge: I'm waiting for the video to come out. David, what is that essence for you?



Grossman: Once I asked a woman, what is her luz, and she answered longings, which is a beautiful answer, and I would adopt that. Or maybe the act of telling a story. If I don't put reality in to the form of a story, I don't understand life.



Younge: David Albahari, you once wrote one of the most depressing things following the disintegration-and up to the disintegration-of Yugoslavia. The way that writers chose camps-nationalistic camps. Instead of being outsiders in this nationalistic tradeoff, they became very much insiders, and, if anything, cheerleaders. Why?



Albahari: It's my belief that writers-and many writers do not agree with this-should remain faithful to their soul, which does not make political choices. These writers should speak for themselves. My feeling was that they were losing their souls so quickly. Writers are writers when they write. Once the process of writing is complete, you do not exist as a writer anymore. You exist as a human being, of course. You can go outside, join the revolution, be against the revolution, or change sides, whatever, but do not use your writer's soul for that.



Younge: Veroniki?



Dalakoura: I want to say two things.Nobody can pass the same water twice - the water that flows past your body is always different. And the soul and the body are two different things.



Younge: A forced distinction, in a way?



Dalakoura: Yes, but I'm not sure. Nobody is sure. After death, perhaps - now it's impossible.



Younge: On the one hand it's a forced distinction, but on the other hand, there is a difference, isn't there?



Dalakoura: Of course, there is a difference. There is flesh and bone, and on the other hand there is something else.



Younge: Ed, do writers have a special role in this?



Sanders: In ancient times, the writers were the news. The poems, the poets-Homer-were the six o'clock news, were the way that cultural information was spread. There is an American Indian saying, "Tell a good story and the whole world will listen." People would ask my friend Robert Creeley, the great American poet, "Why do you write poetry?" and he would answer, "Because I can." And many of us have discovered through hook or crook that we can write, and that we have to write. We're compelled-artists are the antennae of the species and writers are the nuclear physicists of reality-we describe the actual equations of life.



Younge: I'm going to come back to this sense of home for a minute, because what you described, David, was a home based on geography.



Grossman: It's not only geography. It's more than that.It's so subtle that it's difficult even to put it into words. It's something that I feel very strongly, and it has to do with the fact that I believe we Jews do not feel at home in the world. There is something strange, or unnatural, with our contact with reality. Since the time we were created as a people we were a larger than life story, and if someone is a larger than life story, it means that he's not really in life, that he's more in another dimension.



There is something very evasive about our attitude towards reality. Maybe it prevents us from achieving some normal relationship with our neighbors. I do not say that we are the only responsible party, not at all. The Arab countries are very efficient partners to this abnormality, What does it mean to live in a place that has no border? It is like living in a house where the walls are always moving. Israel is called the Promised Land. It's not the "Land of the Promised" and it's not the "Land that has been Promised", it's the Promised Land. I hear it in Hebrew, in all languages, as the Ever-PromisedLand, and that means that it's never achievable. You never get there, no matter if you live there for sixty years or a hundred years.



We have a wonderful prayer in Shabbat, in Saturday afternoon- It's called Musaf. "Implant us in our borders." I ask for nothing more than that, to be in our borders. Then, I believe some of the wounds of history will start to heal.



Sanders: Amen.



Albahari: You are ready for Canada.



Grossman: No, I disagree. I want to be in Israel despite all my criticisms, and I am sure I am going to see this place healing from its wounds-not tomorrow, not in ten years' time, but I believe it can be a place that is really so interesting, a location between the east and the west, between modernity and the ancient world. Eight generations of Jews did not have this chance to explore their sovereignty and I was born to this reality, so I think I will not trade it for the world, literally.



Albahari: Of course not. I was only joking-but maybe I should actually go back to Israel.



Grossman: First let me fix this little bone. Then, you will realize immediately where you belong.



Albahari: It would be interesting to hear how someone who comes from a very long tradition of the same place-



Gestures to Veroniki.



Dalakoua: Thank you, but I don't want to speak as a Greek. Greece has had many problems in the past, but why? Why not? No borders, no limits, no countries! Why should we be limited by this mentality of being a Greek, a Serbian, an American? I'm opposed to this view.



Younge: There is another way of looking at home, isn't there? Which is a mobile home, a sense of values.Once you stake a sense of home in a place or ethnicity, you are then defined not by what you do, but who you are. Is that fair­?



Grossman: My dream-and by the way I share your dream, Veroniki-is to live in a world without borders, without steep definitions of religion. But I envy you for being in a situation where you can hope. I'm still not in that position. First we Israelis have to pass through the phase of having this fixed place and then, as you suggest, is this opportunity of not stagnating in a place.



Younge: Ed, one of the first things to strike me when I went to America was the prevalence of the stars and stripes. Do you get a sense of a hyper-patriotism?



Sanders: Well, not where I live in Woodstock, New York. Eighty percent voted for Kerry. We don't allow right-wing nuts to parade in the streets. But I don't mean to answer impolitely. It's true. There is a kind ultra-patriotism in America now. I don't think it's as quite as widespread as people think. Many Americans are much more sober, but there is a hesitation to speak out on issues-globalization, for instance, or privatization. Many people are opposed to some of the things going on in the name of the nation. I think that this opposition will arise, but as to home, a part of it is spiritual. Let's say you find an acre of land or a stream or a lot or a house and your brain kind of flows out spiritually and conjoins with the shape of the soil and the land-that's home, that's spiritual togetherness with a piece of land. Or it could be a homeless shelter by the railroad track that you fixed up. Or it could be a creek-bed where you walk or you pick mushrooms or forest. As for borders, spiritual co-mingling with a piece of land is important, and ultimately having a world where there are no real borders, other than neighborhoods.



Younge: Okay, I'd like to open it out to the audience, just to see if there are any questions, comments- Try and keep them short and sweet.



From the audience:This question is for David Grossman. My aunt was put through a concentration camp in Germany during the second world war. She survived and immigrated to the States. I definitely agree with you that Israel has fragile borders, but now Palestinians are being denied their human rights, and are virtually being put into concentration camps within Israel. Not to justify terrorism, but don't you think that the people should co-exist as equals?



Grossman: Israel is occupying the Palestinians. A result of the six-day war, we found ourselves occupying the west bank and Gaza and we have been stuck in this situation for thirty-seven years. I regard the occupation as the most serious catastrophe that happened to Israel as a state, because it has ruined the Palestinians, and it ruins us. We just survive from one catastrophe to another



May I tell you just a little story? Some time ago, I saw in Israeli television there was an interview with a young Israeli couple on the eve of their wedding. And the interviewer, who was a foreigner, asked them, "How many children would you like to have?" And the wife, the bride, she answered immediately, "Three." "Why three?" asked the interviewer. And she said with a tender, sweet voice, "Why, if one of them is killed in a war or terror act, we shall still have two left." The interviewer went pale. But I tell you, her answer sounded perfectly understandable, because when you live in such a reality-well, you just become distorted, in a way.



Younge: More questions? I see a man in the back there-



From the audience: I'm going to steer away from politics and go back the most important thing-the soul. When I write I believe my ideas, my desires, my creations start with the soul, go through the head, and come out the fingertips. Do you agree with that idea?



Younge: Starts with the soul, goes through the head, fingertips, onto the keyboard. Veroniki, what's your process for writing, where does it start?



Dalakoura: Inside. Life. Experience. Prague. Athens. Everyday life.



Younge: Is it an emotional response to those things, or cerebral response?



Dalakoura: Emotional. Of course!



Younge: Why of course? It could be cerebral.



Dalakoura: Emotional.



Younge: David?



Albahari: Well, I agree to a certain point. It comes from somewhere inside. So whether you call it soul, or whether you call it inspiration, or whether you call it nothing at all-it doesn't matter. My feeling comes from somewhere, but for me it's actually proof that soul has no borders. Soul is limitless. Borders come with the body. Each of us is the whole world, and we only, as writers, as human beings, we only gather little pieces of the world that our soul travels through and reaches every second of our existence. Something which is without words, that exists in a universe without words, turns into words, becomes words. Your soul becomes your writing.



Younge: David Grossman, is there a different way that you approach it -because you write non-fiction as well? Do those come from-obviously, metaphorically, it all comes out your fingertips-do those come from different parts of you?



Grossman: In a way, yes, but even when I write documentary books, I write about things that are in my soul, that are burning in me.I don't write about something that is totally remote, or that I can be totally abstract and theoretical about. I write about existential problems of myself and my children as individuals. I take it very, very personally. Of course, I derive much more pleasure from writing fiction. To write fiction is such a total experience. Everything goes there, and I feel like I'm on fire when I write fiction, when I have to invent, when I have to enter the psychology and the body of another person and to understand, "What does it mean to be another human being?" This is something that we really do not know, but only through writing, you can achieve that, and it's such a wonderful moment when you know this filament, this thread of warmth and light and passion that burns inside another human being. You know, Chekhov said, "When I sit to write a novel, I'm ice cold." I'm definitely not ice cold.



Younge: Ed, you've been doing a history of America in poetry, which is a mix of fiction and more lyrical style for something that is more used to prose.



Sanders: Correct.



Younge: How did that go? Matching those two styles?



Sanders: Well, there's an American poet named Charles Olson who said, "It's very difficult to be both a historian and a poet," but it is possible. As inaccurate as it may be, The Iliad and The Odyssey are partly history-and poetry, so it is possible. It's not easy. I'm writing a nine volume history of the United States in verse, going all the way back to the fifteenth century, and I'm now working on the fall of Nixon. I'm glad they've discovered who Deep Throat is. I thought Henry Kissenger was Deep Throat. So my heart is broken.



Poetry is condensed truth. You try to bring in all these strands. It has to be like a high-energy grid, bringing your eye down through the information. As for the soul, I would love for there to be a soul. What is that- (Sings) "There'll be pie / in the sky / when you die..." You know that Joe Hill song? I wish there were pie in the sky when you died. Freud said to a young leftist, "Don't try to save people, because they don't really want it." So I hope there's a soul. Come on, soul! Please!



Applause.



Albahari: But, Ed, we know the answer now. The one who comes with the pie is the right guy.



Sanders: Well, Blake-William Blake-said, "What do humans, men and women, desire in each other?" And he answered: "The lineaments of gratified desire." Eros in the human body is a clear indication of the possibility of eternity, Erotic experiences hint at the pie in the sky. Ultimately, the body flows into the river of time. And the soul, which participates in the body, might have an ability to taste of the body, and to help you as a human, but it may or may not elevate you later.



Younge: And on that note-I would like to thank all the panelists. We've had sex with angels that can't sit down. Ed's got soul, I think everybody here's got soul. If you see a man with pie on your way out, grab him, because he's the answer. Thanks very much. Veroniki, David, David and Ed- And thank you to the audience.




PWF 2005