I have within me a gigantic idea of historical megafiction that takes in the entirety of Jewish History. I'd hoped that by now I'd have used the last four months to take a serious crack at getting it done. But every time I start I have trouble getting out of first gear. Every attempt so far had good nuggets amid a bunch of shit.
I've made stabs at beginning it chronologically: in which Abraham, whom the Bible clearly paints as something like a schizophrenic, kills Isaac rather than stopping from killing him at the last moment. In this version, the 103 year old Sarah would die immediately upon hearing the news and Abraham would have a stroke rendering him very confused. Eliezer, fearing that the Hebrew tribe would break into civil war, abducts Abraham in the middle of the night and takes him to Ur, where Ishmael and Hagar have set up house with Beulah and Laban. When he gets there, Eliezer convinces Abraham that Hagar is Sarah Ishmael is Isaac, and brings them all back to Chevron, where Ishmael adopts the name of Isaac and Eliezer convinces Abraham that Ishmael is in fact Isaac, whom he never killed. And while the tribe knows that something foul is afoot, the succession is provided for, the Hebrew tribe stays afloat, and agrees to operate as though the lie was truth.
I also tried starting it from the end and working backwards, where a slightly crazy guy named AC Charlap who seems like someone you all know starts experiencing visions of all sorts of events through Jewish history as though he's personally present at them.
I even tried cutting it up and starting at the beginning of the twentieth century, where a family of twelve sons lives in a shtetl and the money dries up, so they have to disperse all around the globe and experience all the Jewish vicissitudes of the 20th century.
The problem is that it's much much too big. It has 'Great Jewish American Novel' written all over it, and nothing is more guaranteed to be terrible than something which consciously tries to be great. Every time I have a great idea for it, I have ten more ideas that are clearly shit, and I have no idea how to filter the ideas' flow into anything that I would want to read, let alone anybody else.
I am so fucking sick of writing about politics, caring about politics, hearing other people care loudly about politics, hearing myself respond to it, convincing myself that I have any idea what is right and what is wrong, convincing myself or convincing others that any concern of today matters any more than the concern of yesterday which was completely unrelated to the concern of the day before. I am so sick of moral absolutes, my own as well as others, keeping up the pretense that anything that was true about this era is not what was true about other eras. It's the same types of people I knew who when they were teenagers thought politics was complete bullshit are now the people who think politics are the absolute be all and end all of living, and the issues of the present are so important that nothing can wait for the future.
There is no such thing as the present. The present in which I start this sentence is a different time than the present in which I complete this sentence. There is only the past and the future, everything that's already happened, and everything which is going to happen. Even the act of doing things themselves can be cut up into a million parts of things we've already done and things we have yet to do.
The only thing that's truly interesting about it is understanding why people believe what they believe. The world is complex enough that most things we believe, even the things we're experts about, are completely wrong, so even or perhaps especially if you disagree with their points of view, understanding why people believe what they believe is the most interesting thing about politics, about religion, about philosophy and life, about people, about fiction and art, maybe even about science.
And those are the stories I want to tell, but how?.......
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