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The Exile

I was listening to Vivaldi's flute concerto, "The Little Goldfinch."

I felt like taking off. But where could I go, to Madrid or Portugal where my ancestors died in the auto-da-fe, all they remember of us is the Jewish bread; the Vienna or Berlin, it's the same Sabbath bread; Warsaw, Vilnius, even the crust will be more than a day old perhaps, a thousand years old it will never taste the same somehow. Perhaps to Rome off the Jewish quarter, where under the Pope's nose we were sent away to a place without bread. Or Bethlehem, City of Bread, now taken not by the baby in the manger's people but Islamics who despise the Saturday and Sunday people.

I find it useless to travel with my own thoughts. For though they are my own, someone will misappropriate them for their own political or social reason. I have given up politics and sociability for that reason. There is no reason for me to show up and listen to the prattle of politicians or society movers. They are strictly Poly Ester, not the Sarah Bernhardt of the French salons. And with Proust gone, except in his supercilious disciplines, Spinoza put away for his ideas of honor by the honorable people, Blum jailed, Rathenau murdered, Freud's relatives reduced to the burnless ash by their killers, where is a sad aphorist (who plays chess and games) to travel? The streets of the cosmopolitan cities are Judenrein. Hitler won and especially if the Chosen People give into despair, especially from the master race. That's his victory.

So I go into the cold wintry air, laugh at the world's ridicule, fool with the wiles of women's ways, and the jealous fools of man's incomprehension, a psychiatrist's stress, a violinist's tension, since I chose words for notes after I realized like Pasternak and Bernhard I couldn't be the role virtuoso living out of a suitcase in every major city where the people only want to be entertained. The genius age of Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz are gone. It's now a politically correct Asian theature, Suzuki has taken over from the Russian school of the violin, Sony has taken over the Lowe's Theatre and we are all to take it in stride.

The soul of European music is gone and we are not allowed to even speak of it. Like philosophy frozen now into analysis or Heidigger and company who think they won the war.

"Are you bitter?" asked a life-long companion.

"No, just to see my world, my century perishing in mediocrity and the second rate hailed as genius, oh nothing like that."

"Take religion; it's become all buffa and opera has become merely a religion, a ritualistic Saturday at the Met. But where is Callas, betrayed by Jacqueline and where is the other Jacqueline, dead from her own love sickness."

"'You are not what you are,' I read the booknotes of that reviewer saying, you are a mystery. You can't be typed."

"Or hyped," I added.

"But you aren't for the politics of the moment, of race, gender, class."

"There is no class to it, race is inappropriate to art, gender is always polymorphous perverse and politics is autonomous."

"Excuse me?"

"Who are you talking to?"

"More than your conscience."

"Just give me the silent treatment."

"I heard your neighbor just died of a stroke."

"He was an anonymous poet and he preferred it that way."

"Whatever happened to the convert who became a Jew, a Christian philo-semite, a Zen follower, a Muslim, and then a guru after studying with the Hindus in Nepal?"

"I heard he became an evangelist of his own religion."

"So you chose not to travel."

"No, I kept in my own nest."

"May I hear 'The Little Goldfinch?'"

"Yes, Vivaldi has a way of amusing me the way Bach co-opts my spirituality, Mozart brings me to his Masonic heaven, Brahms makes me feel (of all people) romantic, Schumann nostalgic and Schubert gay."

"You don't fit in the new Millennium, Ahasuerus."

"No, it's minimum of mind and its reaction to the mix of mankind does nothing for me."

"Oh, the masses going their merry widow ways choosing their spiritual trips, their new politics, ecological, theological, sociological and ideological nonsense went out in the nineteenth century and died in its ashes."

"But Ahasuerus… You are happiest if you were not born, or couldn't die, would be in wanderlust, live forever, live eternally damned or who will die in old age."

"Ask the Europeans who think they are going to be Europeans."

"What will happen to them?"

"When they were young they tried to take over and do a makeover of our faith, trying to kill us off any way they could. Then in the Middle Ages their Teplars went to plunder, taking the gold from Solomon to found their banking system and autocracy, taking our names and titles, intermixing with Jesus' family, thinking then they could take power and have the name of Israel be no more."

"Now after killing us off in Europe and taking our gold even from our teeth, our intellect, music, all our gifts, our homes, our children, now they want to divide Jerusalem again and take their spoils, and rather than think of themselves as Germans, Vichy French, Quisling Norwegians, tulip-driven Dutch…"

"Calm down, Ahasuerus."

"…polished Poles, checkmated Slovaks, pro-Arabist English, neutral Irish, hungry Hungarians, iron-crossed Rumanians, cruel Croats…"

"Be still. So where will you go for your vacation?"

"You haven't heard a thing."

"I growing deaf."

"You don't want to hear from me. You wouldn't mind if I had a stroke right now."

"You think I'm jealous of you, of what you've gone through…"

"But I will always be around."

"Can't you go home to Jerusalem?"

"Do you think they want to hear my cynical outbursts?"

"But the air there?"

"They have their fools, Marxists who think Marx is still their good rabbi, others who dress and think like the nineteenth century, missionaries, apostates, Christ figures…"

"You can always take up residence at Ha Shamir, the nuthouse in Tel Aviv."

"No, I don't need Freud's advice."

"So you will just expand your clarity of soul, the alacrity of the moment, the mendacity of your world, the capacity for your mind…"

"Do you have another suggestion?"

"Go home."

"I look at nature and at our own and I don't want to think progress and love are only in this poet's imagination…but what can I say?"

"After three thousand years of the common era, two thousand years of the Christian era a new century is dawning on mankind."

"Pardon me as I open my window to get out the giggles."

"You have a whole life in front of you."

"I could jump out the window and people would be bothered that I disturbed their day, drivers would be angry because of the traffic, children would be late for self-esteem classes, actors would be upset and late for rehearsal, and those in AA, Narcotics Anonymous, Sex Addicts Anonymous would miss their daily dose of their program; critics would ask why this pseudonymous aphorist was such an unhappy soul."

"Look out the window. It's a finch. Take it's picture."

"Oh, it's already gone like all perishables."

"Leave me, conscience."

"I can't leave you for your devotion and connection to every age."

"All right, I'll live a bit longer."


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