The Ugliest Guitar

“He that is dead lives again.”

The chanting wasn’t coming from a church, and it wasn’t for William Butler Yeats, although that statement applied to him was in fact true.

William Butler Yeats was sitting on a park outside, relatively innocently, thinking that he had always believed that every two thousand years things came around again, which is what he meant about all those gyres, but he was wrong about that. It was every three thousand two hundred. He had forgotten to carry the two.

This was the second time WBY had gotten reincarnated, which is pretty good for a guy who only died in the forties (commemorated in Auden’s famous poem which concludes, “Earth receive an honored guest/ William Yeats is laid to rest/ let the Irish vessel lie/emptied of its poetry/but then let him get resurrected a couple of times/ for fun or whatever.”)

The first time was narrated in Little Gidding, that hilarious poem by the comic author T.S. Eliot, who meeting what he thought was the ghost of Yeats said: “The wonder that I feel is easy/ Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak: I may not comprehend, may not remember.”

And Yeats, supposedly replied “I am not eager to rehearse/ My thoughts and theories which you have forgotten/ These things have served their purpose: let them be./ So with your own, and they be forgiven/ By others, as I pray you to forgive/ Both bad and good.”

Which was a massive improvement on what Yeats, who was not dead, actually said, which was “have you managed to get laid yet, you ponce?”

But these are private matters.

“So I find words I never thought to speak,/ in streets I never thought I should revisit/ when I left my body on a distant shore.”

Anyway.

Yeats, because he technically studied Latin and Greek, as he was abominably bombing high school, knew that the Trojan War had begun this way:

Eris, the goddess of Discord threw a golden apple into a party and said to Paris to grant it to whoever was most beautiful. Three goddesses offered him many bribes, not figure that that would cheapen the prize at all, but Paris gave it to Aphrodite because she offered him the most beautiful girl in the world, Helen, who had so far only been raped once, by Theseus.

And it turned out there was some assembly required, and here we are.

And then….

Well, then Eris had stolen Pluto, hadn’t she?

“Eris,” classified as a dwarf planet, had been discovered in 2005 by the good folks at the Palomar observatory and enjoyed a brief life as the solar system’s 10^th planet[1]. But then they decided that it wasn’t really big enough to be a planet.

Since it is probably 10 km larger than Pluto, that meant Pluto wasn’t a planet.

Just like she’d planned it all along.

People were upset—oh yes, they were. It had touched a chord in a lot of people that they had no idea they had, just like an apple with a bit of glitter and somebody else taking someone else’s wife from across the ocean had 3,200 years ago.

People were really upset. They were too upset to take the time to imagine why anyone would give a rat’s ass in a snowstorm, then to think that maybe something was going on here from the other side of reality. They had begun doing things like wilderness survival training, and going to Renaissance faires. It was like they didn’t know they had no control over themselves any more.

People were upset. And not just people. The great dark god had rather liked being a planet, and good things do not happen to people who fall afoul of him.

“He that was dead lives again.”

It was chanting, that sound. It was coming from a Physics convention in the great building behind the bench that looked like a carbon atom mounting an oxygen atom with amorous intent (so Yeats thought). A flag was waving, proudly, over the convention center. A red flag, red like blood or ketchup. On it, emblazoned boldly, was a simple box.

“He that is dead lives again.”

The chanting was directed at (the godhead of) Schrodinger’s cat, a Jesus for the modern world if ever there was (and if it wasn’t Jesus, which, to some people, it were). The box on the flag represented him (or her, or whatever).

And over the box, on the ketchup-red field, rose a pale white dot, with a red X through it.

That was Pluto.

And it was up to William Butler Yeats—who had once kept himself from leaving his wife on their honeymoon night, for the woman he’d been proposing to for over two decades[2], only because she had “spontaneously” displayed a “talent” for “spirit-writing”, and who had later convinced that same wife that, to keep his poetic vitality into his old age, it was necessary for him to bang whoever he wanted—to save the world.

Again.

Who’s winning?

An extended family of four, on the way to the airport, pops a tire going seventy on the highway. They survive, but they’re going to miss their flight. The first place they find to pull over is a leukemia/lymphoma clinic, which means nearly everyone there is having a worse day than they are.

But they’re just pilgrims, trying to find their way home for the holidays. They didn’t do anything to deserve a near-death experience, a missed flight. God doesn’t make tires. But does He make chance? Luck? If He doesn’t, what’s He doing?

God loves you. Satan hates you. Who’s winning?

They’re just pilgrims on the way. One has fatty deposits hardening in his heart.

When they finally get to the airport, Grandpa pitches over. His ticker had tocked. He’d yawped his last yawp.

Who’s winning?

Underneath the Earth, the shrine of pilgrimage heaves once and switches poles. The death of a patriarch holds precedence over an annual holiday, though in this world, as, as far as we know, in all worlds, there are many more dead patriarchs a year than Christmases.

Like Mohammed going to Jerusalem in a dream, like the mosque over the rock where his dream-foot touched, home is a place from which we leap upwards.

That sound you hear is the pilgrims turning around, reversing course towards the center.

What’s a flat tire that everyone survives? There’d be war in Rwanda, if Rwanda was even a place any more. God didn’t know Adam and Eve were eating, till he saw them with His own eyes. God did not appear to Elijah in the fire or the wind.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

The Emperor has clothes, after all, really expensive ones. That’s sort of the thing about being an Emperor. Who’s winning? Well he is, for now. Just look at all his cool stuff. You don’t have, as the saying goes, a pot to piss in. Or maybe you do, but it’s not platinum coated. And it does NOT have a seat-warmer.

Flights are changed and cancelled. Arrangements are made.

If there’s no reward in heaven, are you going to be pissed about how things went down here?

The pilgrims are coming home.

He sat at the empty table for a long time, looking at nothing. A half-drunk bottle of wine stood near his right hand. He hadn’t even had the energy to finish drinking it all away.

The house was empty now. His wife and kids would be happier, he supposed. He hadn’t been unaware of what this last year had been like for them, with his unemployment, and his subsequent anger and frustration. His daughter…

It was funny, he felt he almost couldn’t remember her face though she had just left a few hours ago. It’d been so long since he’d looked at her and felt like a father, like somebody worth being a father. Everything of the past year seemed like a haze.

He sat completely still for a long moment, staring at nothing. Then he stood up.

“I declare,” he said in a quavering voice, “that I am unhappy.”

Then, as the light covered him, he smiled.

In a moment he was gone.

It makes me sad to go to the “We are the 53%” website, and not for any political reason. Just because, if you go there, in between all the high schoolers and college kids who don’t know their asses from their face holes (no offense kids, none of us did either at that age, it’s not a crime), you’ll find…

First of all, a lot of really inspiring stories. Do they, whoever they are,  think we, whoever we are, don’t think it’s inspiring that someone from a poor or difficult background worked their way through college and made a big success, persevering for obstacles?

Second of all, you’ll meet people like the girl whose dad has thyroid cancer but went back to work working twelve hours a day, six days a week, despite his still-growing cancer.

Or like the girl who says that she chose to go to an in-state public school for economic reasons, worked hard in high school to earn a 90% scholarship to said public school, and so long as she works 30 hours a week and doesn’t go to eat every week, or even every month, she’s just fine.

Or the ex-marine who worked 60-70 hours a week to pay his way through college (in 8 years), now works two jobs, hasn’t had a vacation in four years, and can’t afford health insurance.

The general sentiment is “my life is pretty tough, but I will keep above water so long as nothing terrible happens like getting laid off or some major health issue, since I can’t afford health insurance.”

It makes me sad, because that doesn’t seem to me to be the American dream, which they are nevertheless justifiably proud of having lived.  I mean, would even those people disagree that working ANY job 60-70 hours a week should afford , I don’t know—college? Health insurance? Basic things you need to survive, and thrive, in American society?

It’s the very fact that these people ARE so talented and plucky that it makes me sad. It doesn’t seem like there should be a disagreement between these two groups on this score. ‘

Hell, half of all the Right has talked about for the last year is the fact that there aren’t any jobs. 14 million people in this country are out of work, nearly ten percent of the work force. How can the same people that are so upset about that believe that these people protesting for jobs are just whiny hippies who need to go out and get a job? Do we have 14 million unemployed, entitled liberal arts majors in this country? Is that what John Boehner was doing, fighting for their rights and their rights alone? That seems charitable.

But really, no. And no on other levels, too. It’s not the Tea Party posting on the 53%, right? Because they hate the bank bailouts and Wall Street as much as these guys do, don’t they? Or do they only hate it on their own time?

So, I don’t know. What has stirred up whatever thing thing is?

To me, the basic place this comes from—other than a very understandable urge, if you have made your way in American society to success, not to want to hear someone telling you you’re lucky–is, very simply, that there is something unmanly and un-American about asking for help.

That quintessentially American hero Snake Plissken didn’t ask for help when the guys with the machine guns told him they’d kill him if he didn’t score 8 points on two different backboards within a minute, or whatever it was, even though he’d never played basketball before. He just sacked up and hit a 75-foot three-pointer at the last second.

We see it in sports all the time. As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I saw it first hand. It didn’t matter how terrible Dirk’s supporting cast was over the years, a real man would have found a way to win–until he did, at which point everything is fine. Ryan Braun’s probably going to win the NL MVP over Matt Kemp, even though Matt Kemp led everyone in everything, because Braun’s team made the playoffs. If Kemp, who was .13 batting average points from  the Triple Crown, wanted that award,  he should have led everyone in everything even more.

God, do I understand that. After all, I was born and raised a Texan. But it’s just not RIGHT in this case, and I mean that in the sense  of justice—it breaks my heart.

Persevering through great obstacles when you HAVE to—that’s heroic. And I have little doubt that most of the people who posted on the 53%, or the family members they discuss, are the kind of people who would rise to that occasion and there’s not a thing that I want to take away from that. I’m legitimately proud that they’re my countrymen.

But when you don’t have to?

There seems to be this idea that the salary that you get paid for work is something that God built into the fabric of the universe. Like Jesus came down and said, listen buddy, that 60 hour a week job you’re working? My Father says it shall not pay you enough to afford health care. Try not to get sick.

But it’s not. Not even close. That’s what the protestors are protesting about, and that’s what’s changed in American society. Those jobs–the kinds of jobs available to average Americans– don’t pay you enough to live. And they used to. That’s what the Wall Street protestors want.

People tell me it’s supply and demand. It isn’t. I should know, I was working a private tutoring job while dating an elementary school teacher. I saw way less students, who needed my help way less (if I weren’t there for my students, they’d only have their grades and slightly less high SAT scores to go on, if she wasn’t, they wouldn’t have made it through high school) and got paid way more per hour.

And you’re working 60 hours a week—it sounds to me like your time is in pretty high demand.  But it’s not demanded by the rich, and so you don’t get paid enough to live.  What you do is presumably very much demanded, but not demanded by the rich. That’s the real supply and demand.

Many more of us need elementary school teachers than will ever need stockbrokers. There’s just not much a stockbroker can do with my income. And just for the record, private schools—those schools where you get to send your kids if YOU’RE rich—pay their teachers much worse, on average, than public. That’s not supply and demand.

I mean seriously—seriously, seriously, seriously—the American dream is only needing to work 30 additional hours a week to be able to attend a public, in-state university, the cheapest kind of university they make, at a NINETY PERCENT DISCOUNT as long as you make some sacrifices?

The American dream is, after serving your country, AND getting a college degree , to come back to work a 60-70 hour job and not be able to afford health care, which is a ticking time bomb if ever there was one?

That’s what drives me nuts about this counter-protest, if that’s what it is. One guy says he’s upset because there aren’t jobs for regular people that pay a living wage, and he’s at Occupy Wall Street. The other guy says that he’s managed to get two jobs for regular people and almost gets a living wage and that’s a good thing because That’s What You Have to Do, and he’s at the 53% protest. All the first guys want is for the second guys not to have to do that. And why the hell shouldn’t an honest day’s work yield an honest day’s salary?

Remember, Snake Plissken can’t say no to the guys with guns, so he’s a hero for getting it done. But Superman was invented by two Jews on the eve of World War II. It is possible, you know, really actually possible, for the costs of things no longer to measure up to the salaries of people and for that to be a solveable problem.

These protests are directed at Wall Street for one simple reason. The people who control the money and set the prices have rigged this game so that THEY are compensated way more than supply and demand requires—what else do you call 15 million to get fired, the ultimate in lack of demand—and YOU are compensated way less than a fair market price. They have set up the basketball game where you have to make 8 points in one minute on two hoops. Life is amazing for them.

You say times are tough, and they are, but not for them. That’s why this isn’t a Great Depress-sack-up-and-do-what-you-have-to moment. NO ONE in the upper financial class is suffering. In fact, every study has shown they’ve never had it better.

That’s why you and I, even when we can find jobs, can’t find jobs that pay for what we need, not for things like new cars and iphones and cushy lifestyles where we don’t have to do anything, but for things like education, health care, or even a nice meal out with your family.

If you have made it in American society, be proud. My family is very comfortable, and that’s because my grandfather, the second to last of twelve kids, became a doctor and his son became a doctor, and their money comes from saving lives. I have no debt to my name because of the generosity of my parents, one, and because rather than choosing to pay for an extremely expensive American masters, I got a pretty cheap one overseas, and now they pay ME to go to school. A little choice, and mostly luck.

If you are a doctor, a computer scientist, an engineer or a financier, you might easily think that everyone who didn’t find  a way to being as comfortable as you are made bad decisions. The problem is, in American society, there are way, way too many bad decisions.  Almost any normal job is a “bad decision” these days because it doesn’t result in the ability to pay for a decent lifestyle.

That is all they’re saying. The want more good decisions, more options that afford a decent, not extravagant lifestyle.  It sounds to me like a lot of the 53% DESERVE the same whether or not they think they should agitate for it.

if you didn’t think that the unemployed were all liberal arts grads who went into debt for useless masters there months ago, you’ve got no right to think it now.  And if there’s no hope for the middle class, then there really is no hope for the 99%–whether they want any help or not.

When the guns  are pointed at Snake Plissken, he has to do what he has to do. You don’t have to do this, and that’s because this IS America, not a third world country where there is no infrastructure and no ability to change, because this is a recession, not a depression, and because it’s just prices and salaries–which God didn’t write any where in the Bible, I promise–and jobs. Everybody needs jobs. Even liberals.

And so I complete my digging tour. The dig itself goes on for another week, but my part is done.

To be honest, I feel pretty good about it. I will miss the community, and being part of this thing for sure, but my back feels like it’s been used for spare parts, I’ve got a hacking cough I can’t do anything about (because it’s Friday evening and nothing will be open till Saturday morning), my camera’s lens is stuck, my glasses are broke, and I certainly won’t mind sleeping past 4:45 and not endangering myself by lifting 50 pound rocks out of six feet deep holes. Which is not to say that there is any part—any part that I regret. There’s just a whole lot about people that goes on in digging.

One of the things that’s weird about me, I think , is that I really really believe in the power of experience to teach. A lot of the time, before I decide I’m good at anything, even, I use experience to see what’s happened when I’ve done that thing. Am I a good b-baller? Not really, but I’d still say that in 70% of the games I’ve played I was one of the best jumpshooters. For example. And whatever team I’m on, I put some points on the board, for all that I have the athleticism of a particularly drowsy mule. So probably net positive.

The director of the excavation asked me today how I liked it this time, and I looked around and what I saw was 25 or so people doing extremely difficult things from a godawful hour in the morning, eating the same breakfast as a break each day (eggs, peppers, various kinds of cheeses, pudding), for absolutely no pay and in many cases a substantial financial hardship. So what are people about? This is one of the things. It’s not saving the world, but it’s hard work for, mostly, its own sake. Okay. Proven: people are sometimes willing to do this kind of thing.

This week, I got to spend the last four days “recording”, which was great, although when I describe it, it won’t sound like that.  It works like this. Imagine the hole we dug as a square. It’s supposed to be one. Imagine the area we’re in as having four squares. We’re in area F, and for whatever reason the four squares we’re digging are F5, F6, F7, F8.

Each square is initially assigned what’s called it a locus, which, of course, just means place. The locuses are assigned sequentially, starting with whatever number they start with by a mysterious process I don’t understand. So, say area G’s initial four locuses are 305-309, then our locuses would start out as 310-313.

Then you start digging.  History deposits soil over time, so you can tell that if you dig through one color of soil and come to another kind of soil what you’ve got is soil that was deposited at an earlier time. That layer is older than the layer you were digging. So that’s a new locus, number 314 or so. And the other thing is, maybe the new soil is only on one side of the square, and you have a different new soil on the other side of the square which is 315. By the end of a week, maybe any one square has three different locuses, 314, 315, 316 or whatever.

Everything that is found in any of these locuses that’s not just plants and dirts needs to be recorded.   That’s what the recorder does. Here in Israel, there’s tons of pottery everywhere, so first I write down pottery bucket numbers for all of the loci of that day. Then every time something else comes up, a bone, a piece of flint, today an ancient needle, I jump out of my hole and write down what locus it was found in and find a little bag for it. Eventually, when they take all the junk to the archaeology hideout, or whatever, they’ll have a written record of where everything was found, with everything that was found, that they can use to reconstruct the picture of the site.

Practically, it works like this. This morning the folks in charge came over and told me that what I was looking at in my square was probably a wall collapse, but there’s only one stone square enough to represent a likely third course to the wall. But they can’t get a look at it because there are four other big stones around it. Could I remove those stones.

This happened at 8. Breakfast is at 9. As I pulled my pickaxe back to give the rocks hell, someone found some flint in F7 and I had to record it and make them a bag for it. As I crawled back in and grabbed my tools, someone found a bone. Then someone found a shell. At 855 I removed one rock, they called breakfast time, and I yanked out a second one.

In this business it all depends how you define productivity.

The part about being able to reconstruct where everything was found–which levels, once we cross-check with what pottery is found there and maybe get some scientific dates from radiocarbon or whatever can tell us just when taht piece of flint was used–probably doesn’t sound all that interesting, and I’m really, really glad that that part is not my job. But it was actually extremely interesting to get a window into it. And, you know, gave me some breaks from moving huge stones which is not something I regret.

I guess my last reflection about the dig, about maybe digs in general, in my experience, is they show you in surprising ways how addictive capitalism is.

This is what I mean:

My dig is not what anyone would call isolated, compared to many another dig. It is, for example, right next to, more or less, the Jerusalem zoo. It still technically is Jerusalem. But the closest commercial enterprise besides the zoo is the Malha mall, a 25 minute walk. This may not seem like a big deal, and it’s really not, but here’s the thing. There’s not even a kiosk between here and there. So, for example there’s the coke issue which is this: the school we’re staying at serves two meals a day (except over the weekends), but they have only water in their cafeteria. They do have a coke machine upstairs. But if you want to get a coke you need small change.

It’s not like it’s the biggest deal to drink only water for an entire week, but there was really no way for me to spend money, the kind of activity that would cause me to receive small change, for that entire week. It’s not that there was only water, it’s that there was nothing I could do, which is the anti-capitalism, basically. There was no way for me to get change because I couldn’t buy anything, ergo it was all water all the time. It was sort of amazing. Until I managed to get some change over the weekend, of course.

The other thing is that in Jerusalem, and in most parts of Israel (not most parts of Tel Aviv, but everywhere else), basically everything is closed. So, for now, I got me a hacking cough but I can’t do a thing about it until Saturday evening.  Also, since this place doesn’t serve meals and nowhere is open tonight or tomorrow I had to buy food for the weekend, but there are no ovens or toasters or pots anywhere around here, so it’ll be like pita and hummus and cheese. Which sounds delicious. But I GOTTA do it, too.

So it goes. Sunday it’s back to America (arrival Monday morning), where I can buy anything I want whenever I want. Tired of the meals I can make at home? I’ll go out and get something else. When my glasses break, or I get a cough, I will drive to an optometrist or CVS and get patched up. And I can always stock up on whatever beverages I might choose to imbibe, and put them in my fridge.

I know that that’s all pretty good, and I’m not a hater, but I hope it’s also not such a bad thing for my soul to have life a little (okay, a lot) more on demand for a while. Don’t want to be soft when the apocalypse comes, you know.

Last night, the Germans threw a party for the group. We all had to bring three socks, for some reason, and that’s all we knew about it. There was alcoholic punch, a bbq, a pinecone lit on fire and games like lining up in a row and running a spoon through each person’s clothes in a row, which was weird, but team-building.

Today, my jeans that had had a small rip in the seat for a week decided to have what some might call an actual fault line.  Naturally I spent the day accusing the ladies of checking me out, or alternatively claiming that it was my way of saying my ass is outta here. I asked the site director whether anyone important enough was coming to visit us that it wouldn’t be okay for them to see the contours of my butt, but he didn’t think so.

As my jeans struggled to stay on–hopping up onto a bulk from the hole produced a matching rip in the front, around 12:15–I too struggled, one last time, to give it my all. I don’t know that I’ll do this again. I like archaeology, I don’t absolutely love it, and contrary to popular belief PhD students have LOTS to do in summer. It’s just that, you know, no one’s watching to make sure we do. As much as money, these digs have been investments in time that maybe I can’t afford to do again. If so, if this is my last dig–at least for a bit–could hardly be better.

What we are excavating is a house (a series of houses, but my group is excavating just one of the three currently under way). This is most interesting because, frankly, no one excavates houses. I recently read a book called the Dirty Parts of the Bible. Had it been called the Interesting Parts of the Bible it would probably not have included houses, not because they do not have interest, but because not too many people want to read Little House on the Prairie (But it’s 3000 years old and all that’s left is a bread oven).

As it happens, there are a lot of conceptual problems with imagining houses, starting with the real estate aspect of it. We’re assuming that a dude could just take his family, walk until he saw a nice hill, and build a house there, but did that happen? Was it safe to do without friends, other families to help do the work? If, like this house, it was built in Judah during the time that Judah was being administered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, did the tax collector have to be able to find you? Probably, right?

Three houses is not very many houses, but they are a little fortress-like in execution. If you imagine that most of the work was done outside the house during the day and that the house was only for sleeping, we can imagine, tolerably 7-10 people in one house, probably. This is not a settlement, it’s not even a neighborhood, but it’s not nothing. One of the things we wonder about is the market. If you figure these guys want to eat some steak, they either raise steak in its proto-steak “Cow” form (or, more likely lamb steak), or they have somewhere nearby that they can get it. We haven’t find a wine press here. Do they not drink wine, or can they buy it, and how far do they have to go, and how much do they buy at a time, and what DO they buy it with since nobody seems to have invented money yet (possibly, that is. People say that the nearly exact match in terms of weight between any number of goblets found at Ugarit indicates that, very probably, there was some kind of systematized version of exchange. That is, the goblet, because it was made of metal and identical to other goblets in weight was money you could drink out of).

One of the things we’re doing here involves the site that the main archaeologist worked on the last seven years, which was a Judaean palace, only no one knows whose palace. It’s not mentioned in the Bible, but at the same time, it is the ONLY palace complex ever found in Judah, until the so-called “Palace of David” being excavated on Temple Mount proves that the dates are right and it’s big and all that. We call it Ramat Rahel, for reasons I neither know nor care about. Most people say it’s a Judaean palace for Judahite kings. But everyone knows it COULD actually be the administrative center for the Neo-Assyrian Empire in Judah, and that’s why no one mentioned it.

In the valley we’re excavating, the Rephaim valley, there are a number of settlements, all small like Er-Ras (where we’re digging). Some have installations for wine pressing, some grain silos, but not both as far as I know. Some people say these are little industrial communities that, collectively, serve the king in Jerusalem.  Other people say they supply Ramat Rahel—whichever king was in there, from whichever nation. It’s a puzzler.

Should be fun finding out, provided your idea of fun involves waking up at five am to dig through rocky soil with a trowel and a good sense of humor. And I’m sure it does.

Here we are, in Israel again.

I’d say the getting here went about as smoothly as it could be expected to go. The flights were great, on time—the Newark to Tel Aviv flight had on-demand movies and TV which, as far as I know, is more technology than my apartment has. Among other things, I watched my first ever episodes of “Better off  Ted” (sort of like, The Office + Big Bang Theory + Community? I think? I only really watch one of those shows regularly) and “Cougartown” (surprisingly charming!).

I didn’t sleep much, which I knew was going to be a problem, was a problem, is currently a problem now. It’s not their fault, but one thing I don’t approve of is the paternalism shown in airplane sleep conducting. They feed you dinner and then they put you to bed. Since I don’t usually go to bed at 7, I didn’t succeed in my attempt and when I tried, four hours later, I was met, one hour later with a robotic voice saying in both English and Hebrew: “It’s time to wake up now.”

It was 10 pm DC time and 5 am Tel Aviv time. In neither case is that time to wake up, goddamnit.

We were also, once again, faced with the oldest question known to man: why can’t children control the volume of their voices?

At any rate, the misadventures were few. You get to Jerusalem, or at least I get to Jerusalem, by a Nesher taxi, which is only partially a torture device. It’s a car that seats about 7 comfortably and refuses to leave the airport until it has 10. I sat next to a lady who, god bless her, had a certain amount of girth, and my left arm actually went to sleep from twisting it across my body to avoid an inadvertent vertical spooning situation.

I don’t know what digs are like everywhere, but here it’s a mix of three basic groups. Theology students, archaeology/ literary students, and retired or nearly retired people who think this is a fun way to indulge their interest of history (it is! They’re right!). Not a lot of people between the ages of 30 and 55. Perhaps in another situation, framed in another way, these three groups would have some shouting matches, especially the theology/archaeology kids (there is not much to shout at the retired about in terms of ideology). And it’s not that there are new awkward moments. But mostly it works great.

The last thing I think I’ll mention is that a few people have asked me whether archaeology is hard. After all, on the one hand you’re out in the sun and dirt all day, on the other hand, last year I dug next to an enthusiastic 76 year old. And I guess what I’d say is, that it definitely is, but, that there are shade nets and places to sit and a thousand ways to be useful.  You don’t have to be the guy lifting rocks or pick-axing, all the time. You can be the guy brushing, or removing weeds, or cleaning pottery.

I do enjoy me some archaeology. Especially after this year, when I ate too much, and didn’t work out enough (just this year though, that’s never happened before) and I’m looking forward to this kicking my ass a bit. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to get out here. I’m not an archaeologist, nor does archaeology form a significant part of my studies, it’s simply a very useful auxiliary. There comes a time when what has to get done gets big and too urgent for what would be nice to do, and that time is probably already, though here I am in Israel anyway.

So off we go…

Someone once told me that the work of any given poet tends to revolve around three specific themes. There are a lot of ways to hear a statement like that, but I heard it like a kind of fateful ghost. No matter what one turns to write, the same beings will find a way to haunt it. When all one has is a hammer, everything is a nail, when one opens the portals for communication with a medium, perhaps the same ghosts can’t help but pour out.

Not much of a poet, I nevertheless think there’s a lot to this. Though the first few years of a graduate program are a fire storm of The Same Old Information, all of it heads towards a kind of terrifying freedom. You should only do the kinds of things you’re qualified for, of course, but tools and skills are different materials. That is, I need to learn various dead languages because these are tools, because without Ugaritic I will be much poorer at writing about Ugaritic literature, despite the fact that no one has ever heard of Ugaritic material. Skills though, synthesis, creative scope, the mining of material for the right or more justified conclusion, these are not things that emerge from classes, nor are you debarred from learning them because you must take many other classes.

That is to say my primary purpose as a professor will not necessarily be shaped by this particular phase of my life in which the hammers and nails of the profession are provided to me, any more than any private individual with a toolshed must keep making bed frames because they have a lathe.

So what are my ghosts?

I think it’s pretty clear to me that for most of us PhD students it has been a long road. The person here who studies dinosaurs probably took those dinosaur books a little bit farther into adolescence than the rest of us, and there’s no shame in that. The one who studies American History probably has a long history with museums and sites of American experience. Natural.

For me, it is narratives. And not singly, but in permutation, the great wave of meaning encased in the movement of myth. What does it mean, if one myth says King Arthur was a British knight of the Middle Ages, whose pleasure was jousting and courtly love—and another says that Arthur was a Celt whose function was to keep the safety and security of Roman Britain alive for just a little bit longer, after the Eagles left, before the Saxons showed up, what does that mean?

This permutation of what I am here for is an ahistorical discipline. It is about “myth”, which doesn’t belong to a country or place. Yes, there are certain countries and places which pique my interest more, and that is Ireland, Greece, Israel, and so on, but this is to enter the mind of the mythmaker and the paths of evolving mythology, to ask what mythology does, what the imagination can make and make to serve.

Yet secondly, I am interested in real contact. The picture of the map, the closer you stare at it, disintegrates, and I am fascinated by the beauty of that. To give an example: One speaks of Greek influence in the Ancient Near East, or vice versa. But what is Greece? In the period of Greek history most often referred to by historians, there is mainland Greece, where modern Greece is today, there is Ionian Greece, which is across the sea, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, there are the Rhodians, the Euboeans, the Aetolians, the Lemnians…

It is not the “Greeks” who appear to have formed a colony on the coast of Syria in the 9th century DCE, it is the men of the island of Euboea, and specifically, them of the city state on Euboea called Chalcis, whose defeat in the Lelantine war to their neighbors the Eretrians seems to have ended that colony. It is not “Greeks” who were the citizens of the Egyptian city of Naukratis in the 7th century BCE but Ionians and a people called the Carians, who are not Greek at all, but appear to have some Greek affinities (and according to Homer, fought on the opposite side of the Trojan war) whose (apparent) particular worship of the god Hecate appears to be mirrored in the work of Hesiod, but not in Homer who does not mention her at all.

Can we not do better than this? Who sailed where, and what stories did they know? It is not the name “Greece” which shows up in Akkadian and Biblical sources to denote those people from the Aegean who made that voyage but the “Kittim”—referring, apparently, to Kition-Larnaca in Cyprus—and “Javan” or “Jamna” or “Jauna”, presumably a referent to the “Ionians” who were the more frequent visitors.

Where did the Phoenicians go, and who knew their gods, Melqart, Ba’al, and the mysterious “Lady of Byblos”, long before we have inscriptional evidence, in the 9th century BCE, when Phoenician ships sailed as far as Spain? This is something rarely spoken of—Phoenicia, little known as more than a name because of the lack of inscriptions and more because the modern cities of Byblos and Tyre sit on top of four thousand years of history, was also the mother nation of Carthage, in North Africa. That is to say, there was a Semitic culture in Northern Africa, addressed towards the growing Roman Republic (which fought three long wars with it, over the course of a hundred years), and one in Spain, addressed to the Celtiberians who lived there. Phoenician culture, Canaanite culture, could not have been extraordinarily different from Biblical culture and there it is, at phenomenally early times, facing the wider world which we know.

This realia of ships and sailors fascinates me. All the stories we have to explain what must have been going on are too simple, too pat. There was a real event, a real meeting, once upon a time men and women met each other, from a land far away, and and they did not think of themselves as two cultures colliding but two people, making their way trhough a younger world. The stories they swapped could only be those stories which each knew, which is to say that the one who meets a Greek does not learn all the stories of Homer, the one who meets a Spaniard does not learn all the tales of the Celtiberian gods, and all that the scribes knew of Ba’al is not the same that a Phoenician miner in the silver mines of Tartessos in Spain could have related to his neighbors, when the time came to knock off for the day. These are people and they took real journeys. If a Greek born in Al-Mina, in Syria, went to the market and found there a pomegranate, did he know that what he ate was not the fruit of home?

The third ghost I have is the land itself, and I’ll make this brief. The one thing every person experiences for themselves for certain is landscape. It can have been anyone’s but at the moment of entrance, it is solely a possession of the eyes. There are, on the sheer walls of cliffs in Turkey, the carvings of the artists of the ancient Hittite Empire, destroyed 200 years before King David, if he ever existed, sat the throne of Israel. The natives, certain of the natives, believe these are the monuments of the Ottoman Emperors, whose six hundred year history did not begin until 1200 years after the time of Jesus. The Irish will tell you that their ancestors considered the great mounds of their island, Newgrange for example, the homes of their gods, but these were built by people two thousand years before the ancestors of the Irish arrived where they are now found.

The Akkadian kings of what later became Babylon and Assyria made intricate, verbose monuments to be put in such public spaces as the marketplace of Sippar, a major city with a history over a thousand years long. They made plainer ones on the rock faces of cliffs, far from civilization, in quieter valleys, in harder to reach places. Is it because working with living rock diminished what the craftsman was capable of? Or is it that, though boastful before their people, these kings wished to speak more plainly, humbly, before their gods? In these remote and difficult regions did they write for less transient eyes?

On the other hand, the cliffside inscription at Behistun, of Darius I, king of Persia, two thousand years later, so hard to reach that Sir Henry Rawlinson literally risked his life to copy it down, in 1835, as an officer of the British East India Company—has a sprawling inscription in three languages. It was so verbose, indeed, that its decipherment posed a major key to breaking the code of Elamite and Babylonian, certainly one of the most important moments in the history of the discipline of Assyriology. It seems king Darius had somewhat more to say to the gods.

Some day within the next two years I will begin on my dissertation, and it will be one topic. I try not to get caught up in supposing that all these vistas will vanish when I chose one for the culminating project of my official education, but I do have fears. Naturally, what one is branded as, becomes, very swiftly, what is expected of one. But I suppose that I shall choose instead to be pleased that so much strikes me as worthy of work, and that if the freedom I imagine nears what it will be in truth, I will not lack for things to try–and perhaps there will be more ghosts to come. At least I know, at any rate, that I will not have to give any of these up–especially if it is true, indeed, that try as I might, I shall not be able to.

Merlin Rogers is a man keenly, painfully, awake to the reality of horrible decisions. That’s something a lot of people don’t understand. The girl you shouldn’t have married, but she had something you hadn’t seen before and lacking an objective way to determine effective love, you figured you had it about right. The career path you shouldn’t have taken, that was okay, but that took you away from something you would have absolutely excelled at, had you thought of it in time—and, oh, how your life would have been different, if you’d been successful. The taco bell, say, you shouldn’t have eaten (okay, that one everyone knows, but it’s DELICIOUS).

The thing is, when you do these things, no one will ever stop you. Everyone knows that, but they don’t get it, like Merlin gets it. They don’t get that the Universe isn’t putting you anywhere specific, to do anything specific, at least they don’t get what that means. People will tell you there’s no right answer, and they’re right to say that. But there are wrong answers. The sex you missed. That’s a big one, for Merlin. It’s a well-known, but unacknowledged fact that a fairly typical response to hearing that someone you knew from high school got married is “oh, well, guess that’ll never happen.” Now, of course, at Merlin’s age it’s second marriages, third marriages, or death. It’s the same feeling.

If Merlin were Robert Frost, at this point in his life—not earlier—he would sit down where the two paths diverged and refuse to choose. He would curse the Universe for being such an asshole as to give him nothing to go on. He would demand that people bring him sandwiches.

He is no longer asked to speak at career days, at book-signings and so on because of his predilection for saying things like “You do the best you can, but if you’re wrong, you’ll pay for it forever.” Or “You could go on working on one story idea for years, and if everybody’s too nice to tell you it sucks you’ll never know, and if they do tell you it sucks, it may never occur to you that it’s not YOU that sucks, and write something else. I mean, if one guy emails six agents and they turn him down, and one girl emails one agent and they accept it, it could mean her story is amazing or it could mean that agent would have been the seventh person the other guy was going to email, and his wife just had a baby that morning which he’s, congratulations, pretty sure is his. I mean, do your best if it’s something you want to do, and fail if the Universe wants you to, you know?”

What do we want to be?

It’s a phrase that’s hard to write because it seems pretty used up, and can’t have an answer like “doctor”, “scientist” or ” astronaut” any more. We, in our mid to late twenties have made decisions causing a narrowing of our world.

Yes, you can always be anything, or go back to school, and there simply isn’t a substitute for a happy life. Let’s assume that most of us have made choices towards things that are good for us, either in terms of enjoyment or because life means we need something, a reliable paycheck, a job near an ailing family member, a job with a flexible schedule–let’s assume we’re falling into the job that, from the mutant  combination of lists of what we want, need, and ended up with in terms of experience and ability, will be ours for at least the foreseeable.

What would I do?

I don’t know. I think a lot more about being, and how I can do that. Everything else seems a little out of my hands.

What hurts me the most when I imagine myself forward is how much I want to remember all this, how much I want this to be memorable.  The number of times I want to run outside with a sign saying that I’m here, letting the CVS across the street know who they live near and so on, is high. I feel the years ahead like a clock, in fact I feel clocks all the time, and I want to remember myself.

We don’t have a lot of money, and we don’t have much time. These are the necessary quirks of the life we’ve chosen. If we’re very lucky, in the future, one might change. If we’re capable of making life choices more or less opposed to the kind of occupational rigor that lies behind most of us having gotten here, the other could change a little, too. We can’t be 21 again, jetting off to Europe to sleep in 10- room hostels and ride trains, Europe on 10 dollars and how much the local beer costs, a day. Some days, we can hardly be alone, even, and other days we can’t do anything but. When you’re gone, and when they’re gone, and I’m working on something I know I’d have to introduce an introduction to, just for somebody to understand why anybody would bother, there’s a hollow space which feels like a clock.

But I believe in truth, beauty, trying to be good, remembering that you’re often pretty bad at knowing which way that is, having your full mind with you when you’re working, knowing you’ll be wiser another day but you have to choose now–Intellectually, I believe that Autumn is the most beautiful season even though I hate getting cold and staying cold. It’s the light, which is hesitant but clear. That’s the way I feel, a lot of the time.  It reminds me of another clock, in Rouen I think, and the sun setting to the point in the sky where it just split around the horizontal of the archway of the clock, and the gold gilding grew longer because the sun was lengthening its spikes. It was a cold day, but where the split sun fell it was warm, and you could stay still and be warm.

The days are emptier, there’s more space for me. It’s the leaves, the only things that get more beautiful the more fragile, the hollower they get. Brittle spirits.

And I believe in– never stopping trying to get better because most people will always be willing to believe that that’s all you had, and what will you miss out on if you and they agree to that? Press the button again, ask one more time, send that email, because it’ll all fade, the pain of everything that didn’t work will fade, and something could come out of it, you could surprise yourself–you can still surprise yourself. That’s something I believe so fiercely about life, and one of the most heartening things, to me.

You can be brave, and good at things you haven’t tried, and you can grow bigger all the time, if you’re lucky. If I can’t muster it up anywhere else, let me be brave at the chance, just for that one moment.

I believe in saying what you mean, politely ,because it’s how you feel, not angrily because you need someone to lose something to have something—-standing by it so that people will know who you were, while you’re here.  I am here. You may all be the beautiful, brilliant things you are, but I will be, visibly, the thing I am, too, and we don’t have to agree. We’re going to share the Earth, no matter what we do. I am here. I hope that doesn’t bother anyone.

Stand up against things even though you haven’t been hurt by them, because you can imagine being hurt by them, and stand up for things because you believe in people.

If we all go around believing in people, we may not do a goddamn thing, but we’ll live in a nice world which we’ll be glad to be part of, I think. And have been part of, when it comes to that.

There’s a lot of good I don’t do in the world, and I know it. But I’m here, and I’ll be here. It’s the lives around my lives I’m looking at, and here for, if I can be of use.  If I can notice, fast enough, when I can be of use, and look for it. Doing my best until I get wiser.  This is me now, doing my best,  I hope.

Part one: Allegro

It was by a series of miracles, not altogether kind, that the fish, Fintan, arrived at the Boston aquarium. As aquariums are, some would say, the perfect place for captive fish, it would not seem to have required miracles, adjectival or not to get him there, but the fact remained that it WAS a miracle—for at one time, long ago, Fintan was the most famous fish in the world.

And the reason he was so famous, as any Irish storyteller will tell you, was that he didn’t used to be a fish. A long time ago, as the Lebor Gabala Erenn states, he was a man, Fintann Mac Bochra, who had traveled to Ireland with Cessair, Noah’s Granddaugther to escape the flood. When that didn’t work, and everybody drowned, he turned himself into a fish.

He also spent some time as a stag, and a hawk, or else the hawk was another magical hawk that was as old as he was , depending on who you ask. There had been rumors that Finn McCool had eaten him, or that he’d died after telling St. Columcille the story of Irish history (along with the hawk, or by himself). But it wasn’t true.  He’d just been swimming around, passing the time. Until the wrong trawler picked him up.

Now he wore on his fish-face a perpetual expression of almost unimaginable weariness.

This mostly went unnoticed since, as a rule, humanoids are pretty bad with fish facial expressions.

His presence at the aquarium doesn’t explain everything, but it explains some things.

On the circular stair that passed for the observation deck of the central tank Angus McGillicudy stands. Angus is a redhaired Irishman, visiting all the way from Dirty Auld Dublin town. He is with a girl he’d been dating for some years, and he begins to get a funny feeling, looking at the tank. “Hey Sharon,” he said. “See that little yellow one in the corner?” He gestured, indicating the aged sage.

“Yeah?”

“Is there something weird about him, or is it just me?”

“Can’t it be both?”

Ordinarily, he wouldn’t insist, but that funny feeling kept spreading.

“I’m serious, Sharon.”

“Looks like an old fish, to me.”

“Looks like he’s screaming.”

This is not all that is happening, right then.

Over in the food court, Jarvis Daniels was butchering a first date. He really hadn’t expected to this time. He’d been reading books.

“I’m not one of those love ‘em and leave ‘em guys,” he says. “I really want to get to know you. I want to see you without your skin.”

He knows he’s made a mistake when the color drains from her face, but it takes a moment to figure out what it is. He is appalled. He offers that he is not a serial killer. He is aware that these aren’t words uttered on any first date that goes well enough to get a second one. He sighs.

Also at the aquarium that day is a young man named Ronald Hayes who has come to the aquarium because he is unbelievably high on narcotics and had become completely obsessed with the idea of seeing some fish.

“HEY,” he’d said to his equally stoned friends. “HEY GUYS.  HEY.  I GOTTA GO SEE SOME FUCKING FISH.  I GOTTA SEE SOME FUCKING FISH LIKE RIGHT FUCKING NOW. LET’S ALL FUCKING GO AND SEE SOME FUCKING FISH.”

They hadn’t come ,but he has managed to navigate the T by himself, anyhow. This wasn’t his first rodeo.

Also there, on that day, is an old man noisily eating a piece of bread, fairly near Jarvis. He has crumbs in his beard.

Outside the window, a hawk winks.