by Joshua Cohen
Begun in 1925, soon extending to multiple volumes, De Casseres’s diary was dedicated “to the thinkers, poets, satirists, individualists, dare-devils, egoists, Satanists and godolepts of posterity”; the introducing author continues, on the manuscript’s frontispiece: “This book will be continued to the end of my life—a new volume about every two years. Please read carefully and to the end to get full flavor of book. It is all spontaneously set down, and all literally my self.” De Casseres kept making random undated entries into older, weaker age; le prosateur was going on seventy when he noted that the world had never appeared so threatening: “This jealousy of likeness, that is at the bottom of the German persecution of Jews today,” and, “Adolf Hitler is as personal, private, and peculiar to the German people as my morning bowel movement is to me.” Toward diary’s end, just before his death, the physical evinces and affects as much as the written: Not only is De Casseres writing letters to God, he’s also writing letters as God, to himself; the paper gets cheaper, thinner; typewriting gives way to handwriting, a tremored scrawl.
Interleaved with the metaphysical whimsy, racism, and misogyny (“God couldn’t possibly be a female, for He keeps so well and so long the profoundest secrets of life”), along with a loathing regard for his own Judaism, is to be found a trove of the most startling epigrams our country has ever known—the work of an American La Rochefoucauld or Lichtenberg, a Karl Kraus or George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, these stacks of incomprehensible, often insipid pages could be edited down to a hundred-page book of surpassing aphorism; but because I haven’t yet received that commission, and not everyone has the time for a library visit to pile through the archives, I offer the following—a De Casseres chrestomathy, as Mencken styled his own collection of a career’s worth of the miscellaneous but brilliant:
A practical man should have knuckles in his eyes; a poet should have them in his images.
To almost any American “thinker”: the feet of your thoughts are always asleep.
All summits are cemeteries.
Art can only influence artists.
If you have no ideas, beware of your tenses and your grammar.
An emotion has more reality than a nail.
Hope is the promise of a crucifixion.
Whatever we do is a remedy.
Beauty is distance.
Only the ugly are modest.
Identity is partisanship.
The difference between Science and Theology is that Science is evolving ignorance and Theology is static ignorance.
We used to say, “It is raining.” Now (1930) it would be more appropriate to say: “The bladders of the atoms have opened and torrents of electronic urine lave the asphalt.”
Symbol.—I live behind a statue of myself.
Esoteric.—If you swallow your jewels you will have to recover them in your excrement.
Things that intoxicate me.—Gardens; the sea; mountain solitudes; great poetry and great prose; abstract ideas; profound sleeps; twilight; music; God, the sense of Wonder and Mystery; Satan; amorous sports; Bio’s love; the peace of death; wine; fastflying automobiles when I am in one; the voice of little children; the word Shelley; the word Baudelaire; the words Victor Hugo; imaged coitions with ideal women of an impossible beauty; well-buttered lima-beans; spaghetti; the flash of a metaphor through my brain; praise from superior minds; the stars; checks, checks, checks.
Keep the masses happy. Unhappiness should be the privilege of the few.
To have written a book that no one has ever read is like having a face that no one has ever looked at.
Pleasure has no eyes.
All life aspires to mirrors.
PARAGRAPH FOR LIU XIAOBO
THERE IS NO NEED TO magnetize honey just like there is no call for imprisoning writers of conscience (they’re already imprisoned by conscience). To apostrophize the regime is to take away an apostrophe from the end of your name. You are ended. You own nothing. To seek to dismantle Chinese quote unquote communism with literature is to try to shatter a mountain just by singing at it. Soon enough you forget the mountain and focus on the song. Xiaobo—I have read you in translation and admire you greatly. I have signed a petition protesting your arrest. I am an unimportant American of Jewish extraction. Half my body is corn syrup, the other half is whole. We will probably only meet when we’re dead.
FROM THE DIARIES
THERE SHOULD BE WORDS FOR THE FOLLOWING IN GERMAN
…resentment-of-another’s-culture, resentment-of-the-authenticity-of-another’s-culture, resentment-of-the-perceived-authenticity-of-another’s-culture,resentment-of-one’s-own-perception-of-another’s-culture-as-authentic,the-darker-shadow-formed-by-the-overlapping-of-two-or-more-shadows-on-the-dance-floor…
GERMANY TO JERSEY FOR THE HOLIDAYS
Mom: a cathedral restored. Dad: a casino demolished.
THOUGHTS ON THE ROTHS AND THEIR KADDISH
IF YOU’RE A WRITER, YOU translate yourself. There’s an idea in your head, or an image, and it must find its way to words. There has always been a tension, a tension or an opposition, between writing that seeks to record life as experience, in the private language of experience, and writing that seeks to refine or winnow life into final statements, into fixities, with more-public vocabulary, syntax, grammar. On one hand, think of William Faulkner, who sends personal and so imperfect memories stumbling stuporously across Yoknapatawpha. Then, on the other hand, think of the safer, saner Saul Bellow, who tells us intellectually what Chicago means, clearly, even conclusively. This push/pull between inhabiting the self and experience, and making the self and experience intelligible to others, is especially pronounced among writers who write in second languages, and, to a lesser degree, among writers who write about a culture that is not the culture they are writing for or toward. Someone like Bellow, born to immigrants, born to Yiddish, beginning to write in post-WWII America under the sign of bestsellerdom, must have felt compelled to explain more, to explain his intentions, in a fancy Hyde Park version of the way my own relatives, when they spoke English, often spoke. very. slowly. and repeated themselves and repeatedly YELLED! to make themselves understood.
The question all second-language, second-culture writers must ask themselves is simply formulated: “How much does one translate?” Which is to say, “How accurately?” Do we translate the names of foods (cholent), or of family members (machatunim), or the texts of our blessings? Do we stet them in their original languages, but then set them in italics? Do we explain what they mean—what they mean to us—or does their foreignness alone speak to that significance (halevai)?
Here is what I’m talking about: Henry Roth was born in the shtetl of Tyshmenitz (in Yiddish), or Tyśmienica (in Polish), in Galicia, in 1906, but came to America a year later. Yiddish was his first language, his mamalashon. In his exemplary Call It Sleep, published during the Depression (1934) with low expectations from the marketplace, but with the highest of expectations from art, the protagonist David Schearl (that is, David Scissors) is referred to by his father as his father’s “Kaddish.” No explanation is given of this. There is no expository clause or note that tells the reader this is a Yiddish euphemism for the firstborn son who will say the Kaddish prayer in memory of the father when the father is deceased. Two generations later, Philip Roth (no relation) would find it necessary to convey to his readers that his own Kaddishes (not Kaddishim) were recitations of the Jewish prayer of mourning (though the prayer’s text itself actually never mentions death and merely praises God). What happened between Roth’s Kaddish and Roth’s Kaddish?
Speaking within the context of a single language—say, within the historical context of this language, the language of Anglo-America—the tension between private language and translation as explanation is often thought of as the tension between what is called “literary fiction” and the popular. Though I prefer to think of this divide as that betwe
en being, just being, and odious “identity,” which is the corpse of a culture that must be buried deep.
In my generation, let us say, Amen.
DREAM TRANSLATIONS FROM THE EARLY HASIDIC
NACHMAN OF BRESLOV, BORN IN Medzhybizh, present-day Ukraine, in 1772, was the founder of Breslov Hasidism and despite his death, in Uman in 1810, remains the movement’s leader. This is why Breslovers have been called, have called themselves, “The Dead Hasidim.” Fittingly, their essential principle is what the Rebbe referred to as hitbodedut: “self-seclusion,” “auto-isolation”—a lone contemplative state to be sought not in a sanctuary but in nature, for the purposes of inspiring spontaneous personal prayer, not necessarily in Hebrew, but in one’s most fluent tongue. Breslov, then, can be considered a sect only inasmuch as it’s considered a sect of individuals, each of whom pursues a direct and utterly private dialogue with God. The Rebbe’s chosen setting for hitbodedut was in the woods or fields; his chosen time was in the middle of the night—the time of dreaming. Psychoanalysis defined “dream” as wish fulfillment and so allied it with prayer. If it follows that a collective prayer can express a collective dream, then the Breslovers’ rejection of community worship might express an unfulfilled wish for extinction: their own, or their people’s, the world’s.
* * *
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IN 2014, DUE TO a variety of factors too traumatic and banal to recount, I found myself suffering from insomnia and immobilized by depression and sought psychiatric treatment. I would go to school and deliver my lectures in the mornings, then have two hours to kill—to thought-murder—before my afternoon appointments. I had no appetite for lunch, home was too far. I considered joining a minyan, I considered suicide. Instead, I wound up sitting on a bench in Bryant Park in Manhattan and reading and translating Hasidic texts, which led to my reading and translating texts from elsewhere and earlier in the Jewish tradition (the languages were Hebrew and Yiddish). The following selections are from two of the spiralbounds I was spiraling through at the time—call them wishful dream-journals, unfulfilled prayerbooks: succor for sleepless yearning.
Once, in 1802, in the woods outside Breslov, a young Hasid was troubled—about an upcoming marriage? or his sister’s infirmity?—and wandered among the trees mumbling a prayer. Another young Hasid was also troubled—perhaps he too had a marriage? or sister?—and, at the same time, was doing the same, wandering and mumbling. Though they were unable to see each other, due to the density of greenery, it is said that they were able to hear each other and, indeed, not only were their practices the same, their prayers were the same as well. Their individual spontaneous prayers were identical, verbatim.
Chayey Moharan, the book’s title, means “Life of the Rebbe.” “Moharan” is an acronym: “Morenu, HaRav Nachman,” “Our Teacher, Rebbe Nachman.” It was written, or compiled, by a disciple called Reb Noson, and contains, amid homiletics and practical advice, numerous accounts of the Rebbe’s dreaming. The Rebbe himself features in many of his dreams, and in not a few he importunes another dream-character, to demand an explanation—to demand an interpretation.
Rabbinic opinion differs as to how to interpret the interpretation of a dream that’s presented in a dream, but it’s significant that even the Rebbe’s oneiric interlocutors seem to doubt the endeavor—to doubt the Rebbe’s capacities or intentions. After a particularly wild dream (#83), about twin palaces and swords with multiple blades (one that brings death, one that brings penury, one that brings physical afflictions, etc.), and disciples who swallow sparks that seed strange creatures in their guts, the Rebbe begs “an old man” for his thoughts, and the old man grabs his beard and says, “My beard is the explanation.”
Another time, in 1868, a goy merchant from Kiev (or Lvov) was in Lvov (or Kiev) and strolling past a bank, from which an ornament, or the scaffold for the workers installing an ornament, fell—it fell on his head—and knocked him into a coma. The goy merchant was kept in hospital, where he babbled in a language suspiciously Hebraic. Brought to interpret was Reb Nachman Chazzen, or, in other tellings, one or both of the Lubarsky brothers (Reb Moshe and/or Reb Zanvil). The merchant, despite never being a Jew, was pronouncing a perfect rendition of Ma Tovu, a common Jewish prayer that, when he emerged from his coma, he was unable to remember or even recognize.
Another of the Rebbe’s dreams seems too explicitly didactic (#85). In it, a man is flying one moment, and home the next—he’s in a valley, and home again—he’s atop a mountain, and home—he’s picking golden vessels from a golden tree, home. Is this possible? How is this possible? These are the questions the Rebbe’s somnic-surrogate—“the host”—asks a man who turns out to be an angel—“the guest.” The angel’s answer is—like the dream itself—too long and too intricate with references and puns, but basically he says: “You’ve been reading.”
The Rebbe had a dream: I was sitting in my room [he said]. No one was around. I got up, went to the other room. No one was around. I went into the house of study, went into the shul, but no one was anywhere. I went outside. People stood around whispering. One laughed at me, another provoked me. Arrogant stares all around. Even my own followers had turned against me. Insolent stares. Whispers around.
I called to one of my followers: “What’s going on?” He replied: “How could you have done such a thing?”
I had no idea what he meant and asked him to explain, but he left me. So I traveled to another country, but when I got there, people stood around whispering. Even there, my sin was known. Everyone knew my sin but me. So I went to live with the trees. They became my followers.
We lived together and whenever I required food or water or a book, one of my trees would uproot itself and go scampering into the city to fetch it. When the tree would return, I’d ask: “Has the commotion died down?” to which the tree would reply: “No, the rumor is stronger than ever.”
—Chayey Moharan, Reb Noson, aka Nathan Sternhartz (1780–1844)
Once there was a turkey that dwelled beneath a table, pecking at flecks and bones. The king quit, the doctors and nurses quit, the Rebbe was called for, came. The Rebbe took off his robes, sat under the table, pecked at flecks and bones. The turkey asked: “What are you doing here?” The Rebbe asked: “What are you doing here?” The turkey replied: “I’m a turkey,” the Rebbe replied: “So I’m a turkey too.”
They sat together through many meals, the king feasting his queens, orgies of doctors and nurses. Then the Rebbe gave the signal for his shirt, which was tossed to him. He said to the turkey: “What—a turkey can’t wear a shirt?” So another shirt was tossed, and both their breasts were covered. Many meals, orgies, and so on. Then the Rebbe gave the signal for his pants. He said to the turkey: “What—a turkey can’t wear pants?” And so on, until both were dressed from top to bottom and human foodstuffs—delicacies not yet partaken of above—were hurled.
“One can eat what humans eat and still be a turkey, I assure you,” said the Rebbe, “and what’s more—one can rise to sit as humans sit, not under the table, but at the table, in the laps of the feet around us, more commonly referred to as chairs.”
And so they rose, and so they chaired. (The turkey once again became a prince.)
—Kochavey Or, Reb Abraham Chazzen (1849–1917)
A king once told his vizier: “The stars tell me that he who will eat from this year’s grain harvest will go insane—what is to be done?”
The vizier said: “We must set aside a stock of foreign grain, for ourselves, so as to not become tainted.”
But the king objected: “We do not have enough foreign grain for everyone in the kingdom, and if we set aside a foreign stock for just us two, we will be the only ones in the kingdom with intact minds. Everyone else will be insane and yet will come to regard us as insane.
“It is better, then, for us two to eat from this year’s grain harvest, but we will each put a cut on o
ur foreheads, so I will look at your forehead, and you will look at my forehead, and when we see the cuts, at least we will be reminded of our insanities.”
—Sipurim Neflaim, Reb Shmuel Horowitz (1903–73)
One Sabbath a man came to the Rebbe and said, “I am lonely,” and the Rebbe gave him counsel: “Take a wife.”
The man did as instructed, but returned the next Sabbath and said, “Even with a wife I am lonely.” The Rebbe said, “Have children.”
The man did as instructed, but months—even years—later, his complaint remained: “Even with children I am lonely.”
The Rebbe said, “Sleep.”
What does this mean?
It means that one is never lonely in a dream.
—Maamarim Yekarim, attributed to Reb Yisroel Dov Ber Odesser (ca. 1888–1994)
This world compares to the next world as sleeping does to wakefulness. In a dream you are never ashamed. For if you were ashamed, you would never dream of sleeping with a woman—sex would never occur to you. You would never commit acts in your dreams that you would be ashamed of committing awake. The reason for this is that dreams at night stem from the daytime’s imaginings.
[…]
Once, a certain Hasid—who commanded his son not to enjoy this world any more than was necessary, and not to let more than thirty days ever pass without a fast—died. But then it transpired that rivals had his corpse disinterred and flogged, which grieved all his adepts deeply. He appeared to one of his adepts in a dream and said, “This befell me because I used to live among tattered books with their leaves all shredded and I took no initiative to reassemble and protect them.”