My wife and I drove to the county seat yesterday to sign a refi. The lawyer's office was full and we had to sit on the faux leather couch in the outer office. I was rereading Herzl's diaries. He had a grandiloquent streak. I came to this passage:
Great things need no solid foundation. An apple must be put on a table so that it will not fall. The earth floats in mid-air. Similarly, I may be able to found and stabilize the Jewish State without any firm support.
I read it to my wife, and she made a face. "An apple is a great thing. Who would ever dismiss an apple? It's an incredible marvel."
I remembered that for years my wife had a quote on the refrigerator from Whitman, whose life substantially overlapped with Herzl's: "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."
I wonder whether my wife's difference with Herzl is cultural or religious or national, then decide it has to do with the poetic spirit vs. the political. Herzl liked to vaporize but he was political, Whitman was poetic.
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RE: "Herzl liked to vaporize but he was political, Whitman was poetic." MY COMMENT: Well la de da! I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree, apple or a mouse!
If poetry is not political, then Ezra Pound's poetry is not political, and neither is the Merchant Of Venice. An apple falls to the ground because it is of small mass compared to the earth and is never far away from the earth mass. The earth is not literally floating but remains where it is due to its own mass relative to other bodies such as the sun, along with the distance between them. Herzl was being poetic in a banal way, same as Phil's wife. Herzl was searching for the various political and economic masses and their relative distance from each other–the right mix of dreams and fears that would keep his particular apple on the table, not ever falling to the ground. He found it way before Hitler did.
Too, Phil's wife's difference with Herzl is cultural, religious, and national. What's a tree to a tree-hugger, to a lumberjack, to a stockholder in the wood industry, to somebody trying to get past a fallen tree on a pathway? Wasn't Leni Riefienstahl a film poet? What was the Blue Light? Gravity is both real and a poetic term.
Herzl's virtual zionist world, though has some increasing competition, the ascent of the virtual world as a rival to the physical world. Witness Iran now. Smart phones. Getting harder and harder to keep the boobs ignorant, no? In the old days Rothschilds used messenger pigeons.
I think Herzl was talking about his ability to keep 7 balls in the air. Politics is built on precedent. There hadn't yet been any for a Jewish state. I'm not sure you or your wife addressed what he was saying, as much as what you were saying.
You're refinancing already? You've only been there what 18 months?
How's your Gaza book coming?
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