On board I read a news item about problems at Tel Aviv airport. It would seem that the take-off flight path has planes fly directly over a considerable cemetery. The descendants of Aaron, the Cohens, destined to be priests, are not permitted to enter burial-places so as not to be defiled by death. A ‘solution’ had been found: these believers take their shrouds with them (in effect, plastic body-bags), and zip themselves inside for as long as it takes for the shadow of the plane to move over the impure place. Due to more stringent security concerns, one is no longer allowed to take along your folded death envelope as hand luggage. The authorities worry about people smothering in their sheets. A rabbi who was unwilling to break the rule hired a small private plane to fly him, wrapped in his shroud, to Cyprus where he boarded a regular connecting flight to London.
We are moving into a whole new world. On an incoming aircraft a gentleman got up from his seat shortly before landing and hurriedly made his way to the forward toilet. Time and bladder have their own pressing habits. Immediately two flight attendants and a third person in civilian clothes (obviously the air marshal) floored and overpowered the hapless man, holding a cocked gun to his head, and all the other passengers had to stick ’em up before placing same on the backs of the chairs in front of them. The trussed man apologized profusely, explained that he is a full-bladdered lawyer, to no avail. (Being from Mexico, his skin was also the color of sunned wind.) The plane landed, agents came on board to take the unthinking fellow in custody, and he was only released hours later, sopping wet by then one presumes.
I crouched in my seat and promptly tried to get drunk. Just before leaving the house I learned about the death of my mentor and old friend, Jan Rabie, far away in South Africa. I was told that it had been hot and sultry there for quite some time. He would have been uncomfortable with the early season heat, lying in his bed in a home for the terminally weak. He’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s for a number of years already. He had become shrouded in grayness. The last time I visited him there he recognized me immediately, but it was as if he had to come back from far to focus; Golden Lotus and Gogga were with me, and he insisted on speaking French. On the 14th, last week, he had his 81st birthday, and the next day his heart stopped. Maybe he’d tried to sit up, to get one last look of the blue mountain wall behind and the ocean rustling below, smell the wind and taste the salt. He’d been a singular traveler, always going against the trends of his time, execrated by the bourgeoisie, so little understood, denigrated even by his fellow writers. . How I loved him.
I tried to write an angry poem about our ranks being thinned out, and how futile our battle against the subversive and sly and cruel Dog Death is turning out to be.
Some months later his wife, Marjorie, the painter and mistress of gossip, will have a massive brain hemorrhage on the opening night of a retrospective exhibition of her work in Fools Forest. When Jan was too weak to resist she used to go to the hospice where he lay at lunchtime and eat up all his food. Now she will end up in the same place. When she finally comes to and is less befuddled she will ask after her departed husband, he has left and she doesn’t know where he is. Friends will gently remind her that he’s dead and gone, but she will contest that and tell them she has been reading the obituaries in the daily newspaper and there was nothing about Jan.
On the German side, when you arrive, matters are more relaxed. You step high and try to look sober. The autumn days are blustery but clear. Many men have clipped moustaches and short, graying hair. They go dressed in long, elegant coats of good cloth. The women are noticeably slimmer than those on this side of the Atlantic. They use little visible make-up and wear their hair loose. Their feet seem to be narrow and their shoes are shined to a high gloss. People carry briefcases (there are few backpacks to be seen) and stride purposefully. Many have folded newspapers that they then open with crackling sounds as if unveiling revelations. They frown their brows and make snorting noises. On the front pages there are reports of the war in Afghanistan and photos of summary executions carried out brutally. Some of the headlines are in Gothic script. Articles describe how a Green Party minister in a three-piece suit voted with the senior coalition partner, the German Socialist Party, to send soldiers to the war, and then speculate about how this may break the ruling alliance. I wasn’t used to being in an environment where people are in appearance so homogeneous, so predominantly white. The streets in Berlin are smooth and clean and often tree-shadowed. I saw no dogs outside. The buildings sometimes have colored facades and the windows are double-glazed. The Tiergarten is aflame with the slow fire and rust of the dying season. Despite growing economic difficulties there still is a lot of good money in Germany. You can smell it on the soft necks of people when you embrace them or on their manicured hands.
The conference was a textbook example of wasted effort, energy and money. Well, perhaps not entirely so. One of the working documents was a recently approved UNESCO declaration on the rightto (cultural) diversity. Although it was written in the regular gray putty of Internationalese, clearly the product of many a compromise arrived at through dull and cynical committee chugging and slugging, it still constitutes a reference point of legitimacy for the oppressed or ignored minorities of the world. Under the title, “The Global Dimension of Cultural Policy,” the conference grouped UNESCO bureaucrats responsible for the implementation of that strange institution’s cultural policies, those running the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” in Berlin, directors and other top dogs of the Goethe-Institut and the Institut Français and the British Council, and random stragglers and strugglers of culture and creativity.
Of course, some of us immediately contested the very idea of culture (or rather Culture), arguing that it was certainly not, or not only, an exportation of ‘values’ (such as human rights, secularism, democracy, the celebration of diversity. .) from the privileged Center to the impoverished world, but rather that one should read these as the expression of a given country’s diplomatic policy which cannot be separated from the more overtly rapacious economics and politics pursued by it, as may be witnessed in the ways in which oil companies (for instance) plunder the riches of the third World. The Ogoni people in Nigeria have been disarticulated by the pressure and the exploitation of Shell, an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, and when Ken Saro Wiwa led a revolt against this humiliating condition he was captured, tried and executed by the Nigerian authorities of the time, working hand in glove with the multi-national. . And oh, the webs of intrigue and complicity (even with ‘the Evil One’), all motivated and justified by profit. There is this story, which cannot be told here, of FBI agent John O’Neill investigating various terrorist attacks on American targets only to find his attempts to prove Bin Laden’s guilt blocked by the US State Department at the behest of the oil lobby making up President Bush’s entourage. The former Soviet republics — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and especially Kazakhstan, also known as “the new Kuwait,” are swollen with oil and gas reserves. Russia will not let the US use their pipelines, Iran is an unpredictable rogue, and that leaves Afghanistan. Chevron, directed right through the 1990s by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embedded in Kazakhstan. Unocal in 1995 signed a contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan to Pakistan. The royal house of Saud protects Bin Laden (for as long as he doesn’t attack them, but only infidel American interests), yeah, and Saudi Arabia, without even the beginning of an inkling of that weird mutant process called ‘democracy,’ spawns the narrowest doctrines of fanatic Islamic fundamentalism to be found anywhere and finances their spreading all over the world. But the US will never offend or inconvenience Saudi Arabia. This is called “respecting the Culture of the other.” If ever those turncoat ‘terrorists’ were caught they’d have to be tried and executed by secret military tribunals lest they start spilling unsavory beans in public. After the wild-goose chase an embittered Agent O’Neill, as head of security at the World Trade Center, haplessly but perhaps fortuitously goes to his death under avalanches of rubble and the hellfire of burning jet fuel. Onward Christian so-holdiers. .