9 & 10/21: (Friday & Saturday) Today marks 9 & 10 days along the journey of the three weeks where the crack in everything beckons a polishing the luminal darkness of this time. Contemplate these two poetic fragments of Benjamin Shevili in correlation to the painting pilgrimage of Zvi Tolkovsky. Amidst the fiery protests on Kaplan Street and the chants erupting in all corners of society, Tolkovsky’s recent exhibit from the Israel Museum is visualizing a parallel sensibility in Shevili’s poetry insofar as neither lead to any holy tomb or site of divine revelation–instead, each artist is inviting us to sit with what is–in all its darkness and horror.

Reconsider how both poet and painter have undertaken their many decades of journey of longing in the Holy Land, seeking what once was and is no longer. Tolkovsky sees this inner process “a pilgrimage without a destination, a work in parts that is also a prayer.” Immersing ourselves in the exhibition may also turn us into pilgrims in this land, as he shares not only yearnings, but also his critique of what has happened here and of our responsibility for the situation today.

What does it mean for Shevili and Tolkovsky to serve as imaginal pilgrims and a guerrilla fighters against a “cruel establishment.” Tolkovsky’s paintings take us into the holy sites on his pilgrimage maps – the Valley of Hinnom, Golgotha, Mount Tabor, the Ka’ba in Saudi Arabia – and he even adds the Israeli Arab town Jisr az-Zarka and nearby Nahal Taninim. Tolkovsky has delved into the pilgrims’ beliefs, practices, and material culture; he has read their chronicles and collected objects related to them, as well as to his childhood in pre-State Israel/Palestine, creating an imaginaltiy, a place that is simultaneously mystical, political, and confrontational.

Consider the intertwining with images of doubt, darkness and death in motifs of the hospital and mourning here Benjamin Shevili’s recent collection, Poems to Yova (2022):

9.
On a bench in the E.R. shall I sit
shall I await results of the E.C.G.
for the hieroglyphic signs of the heart
I shall not hear the nightingale
the rose wilted & my garden destroyed
10.
Never
did I imagine like this
I’d sit
as if lying down
never did I imagine
that I’d die sitting
that I’d lay like
sitting in mourning
shiva

Questions for self-reflection:

1. How might Tolkovsky’s transgressive alter ego, that channels prophetic righteous indignation in the face of empires that rose and fell, corrupt institu tions and occupied land, and disruptive, aggressive social phenomena, intertwine with Shevili’s poetics of indignation in the midst of waiting for death while living?
2. Positioned between the E. R. in the hospital and sitting in mourning at shiva– a parallel pilgrimage into the contours of mortality– how do Shevili’s poems elicit a renewed “hieroglyphic signs of the heart” that might become more attuned to “hear the nightingale/the rose wilted & my garden destroyed”? Where have you loss the abilty to hear that song of the nightingale, where has your “rose wilted” and where has your “garden [been] destroyed” along your spirtiual journey?