πάσχειν γάρ τι τὸ μανθάνειν ἀτεχνῶς ἐστι

On Purim I've fallen into a weird, time-sinking pattern of giving my Rosh Yeshivah and his wife increasingly useless and elaborate art presents. I have no idea what they do with all the crap. Anyway, here is a box I made today to put in their Purim-related food and drink present.



( other angles and sides )

Tonight while H. was busy sewing a sheep costume, I did a drawing of the eighth chapter of Daniel. H. has been at me awhile to do a comic version of the book and while I'm maybe too lazy for that, I'm not too lazy for a one-night drawing.

Daniel is a rich, sad book where images of physical loss and the protagonist's mutilated body grow increasingly outsize in terms of scale, elaborate, surreal. Here he dreams of the ram fighting with the flying goat.

The actual thing I produced is as wide as it is long, but the scanner is fairly narrow, so here is a slice. The paper was wobbly and that led to some blurring; hopefully I'll be able to get a better digital image of it sometime.

( picture )

EDIT: full-picture (but low-quality) scan:

( here )

In this dream my chavruta and I were trapped in an Eli Roth-style hostel. We were locked in a room with a broken door - just a corner was broken off. Looking at it, we noted to each other that it made just a big enough hole for someone to squeeze themselves through if they were truly crazed with the desire to kill. Just then, a crouching figure blocked off the light from the hallway and started slowly scraping through the jagged hole.

I'm drawing again.

Also, a second part turned out to the poem about R Eliezer (with undertones having to do with family and Northern Ireland). Here it is, with the already-finished part under the cut:

( part one )

Part 2

oh, wind in the hair of the horse
of the new moon's messenger,
take me back to my family's house
where the Temple still crumbles
down their insensible cheeks
and patrol boots stamp their laughter hard

where they find my father, and drag him in,
where I lose my Torah, and stand mute at the door,
where youth means trouble, where I cannot know what happened,
where the air and knives are wet and cold -

or carry me away
to the kingdoms of the sea
I will swallow every well and wave
and drown tall ships inside of me.

Down the streets I often see priests, monks, and nuns, some of them Armenians, but many of them are just visiting for a few years of study. What I wonder is, the Christians from Western countries who just show up for awhile, what do they make of Israel, and of being, theoretically anyway, under a government mostly made of Jews? When they walk in the Old City, do they feel guilty? If they don't, why don't they? If they do, does anything in their behaviour or theology change? Or really do they assume it's all theirs anyway, and any Jews are besides the point?

I made some new art.

Recently and reluctantly I've been introspective, mostly on why I am such a Talmud fundamentalist to the point of being a bit like the Society for Creative Anacronisms, egalitarian edition. Is it a psychological difficulty I have? Is it a harmless impulse for truth that manifests in ways that are, as someone put it recently, religiously prideful? (The two probably most annoying things are that it seems right to me to pronounce things during prayer as the gemara thinks they should be pronounced, and when I can get away with it - eg at home or studying in yeshiva - sometimes wearing tefillin outside of morning prayers)

It's funny how the Gra-obsessed segment of Chareidi society, which I work so hard to undermine*, has influenced me, even to the point of occasionally resetting what kind of behaviour I intuit as normal or abnormal (e.g. tefillin use).


*most importantly the misogyny being internalised by my stepkids