What is the Old New Land? Where is the Old New Land? We have no idea what it is or where to look or where we'll find it, but the material who, the how and the whither, the warp and weft, the length width depth and time, the dwelling foundations splendor and even eternity, are mere surface on the face of the deep. The Old New Land is the space between space, where exists possibility, plane, history, law, condition, and infinity; glory, law, lovingkindness, the sources of wisdom, and the crown of creation itself. If it exists at all, and of that existence there shall always be doubt, then it abides in that apogee of maximal cosmic tension to which we all arrive in the instant before the great celestial snap, a place of the world of no end that by wrestling to realize, we seem to bring tiny emanations down to our own, if only for a specific and small indeed finite time, if only in a specific and small indeed definite place. It is that land that within all actions seem motivated by greatness, and much in that brief instant even by goodness, for from that unboundedness of spheres above, we carry those best selves which comprise our share of the divine creation. Once we see it, we work, and we work, and we work, and we wait, and we wait, and we wait, but we're always thrown out of the Old New Land.
Tale 1: The Dreams of Yitzhak Maier
One night as Yitzhak Maier awoke from uneasy dreams in Jerusalem he found himself transformed into a searing prophet.
Yitzhak Maier grew up in Tel Rumeida, a disputed Israeli settlement outside Hebron, oldest of all Jewish settlements, eternally disputed, now and forever. "Then Abram came and built his tent in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built there an altar to the Lord." Genesis 13:18, and from that verse came 3000 year disputation.
In his dreams Yitzhak was six or seven, playing alone in the public playground 200 feet from his childhood home abbetting a concrete wall against which dozens of nephews and nieces and cousins bounced balls every day.
The earth shook. The wall crashed upward. And there emerged a cave, out from which grew a mouth, and out from the mouth emerged not Palestinians but Patriarchs. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, all green from decomposition but otherwise perfectly preserved in bearded biblical majesty. Then the matriarchs, beaded and perfumed in bright wears, with their husbands' concubines to carry their earthenware, unbeaded and dirty with torn brown clothes on the verge of slipping. Joseph appeard next in his Egyptian head dress, carried aloft by four servants in his golden tomb, sitting upright and covered by his many colored cloak. Then King David, wearing nothing but a lute, a loincloth, and oil. Then Herod the Great, similarly nude as hundreds of maggots ate at him from every side even as he walked. Behind these two kings, a Sultan. Saladin the Great atop a horse, wearing his five-crowned turban.
Then flew the child Yitzhak Maier among the patriarchs and kings over the concrete wall and they all landed invisibly amid Palestinian Hebron at night where Palestinians slept as peacably in their beds as did Yitzhak Maier. A distant smell of hookah pet the nose and the bassline of Arab disco the ear.
And Abraham did point to a building, and there saw Yitzhak Maier the building, and the building was a tenement highrise. And into the building charged a pack of zealots, lead by Judah of Galilee, and the zealots did barge the doors down, the screams of the murdered in bed unmistakable. No guns, merely Arabic shrieks and the all too distinct timbre of blades piercing flesh.
And suddenly Yitzhak Maier was back in his old playground, watching modern Israeli university students reclined upon sofas ornately draped as naked Persian women fed the grapes by hand. And as the Greek Philosophers asked them questions, Yitzhak Maier's early Yeshiva classmates fed the philosophers grapes. And after every question, another Yeshiva child of Yitzhak Maier's early years would begin to cry inconsolably, thereby catching the attention of a Roman centurion, who one by one would take the child to the other side of the playground, where his legionnaires would impale Yitzhak Maier's classmates on a pike.
Through the mouth of the cave ran the zealots as though driven by chariot. The zealots killed the philosophers, then killed the modern Israelis, then the Roman legionnaires and centurians. Then the zealots killed Yitzhak Maier's remaining classmates, then even the naked Persians.
And even before the zealots killed a second legionnaire there arrived more roman soldiers: 8, 80, 480, eventually 5000 of them watching the massacre in passive formation.
The zealots finished their killing, and frezied but moments ago, they stood as quietly as a Christian awaiting their turn with a lion. Eight legionnaires went about the duty of mounting the Zealots on crosses. The Zealots dutifully screamed as the nails slid through their wrists and ankles and groaned their weight upon the mounted wood.
The legion mounted their own dead atop a pyre of wood and oil, and amid the sticks were all the Greeks, Israelis, Palestinians, Persians of all ages already seen, and many other corpses besides. And with a jar of oil they set the playground alight.
And then, of course, charged a group of ten thousand Muslims through the cave led by a general with no face. They fought every Roman soldier to the ground, then lined them up and beheaded them one by one.
And then charged through the gate Britons, Germans, French, each with chained armor and each of the three with a different colored cross on their shield. The charge each of each army led by a separate king, each with a jeweled crown which never left his head even as every jewel ever more heavily enwrapped splashes by blood. Through the gate marched all the wives and children of the Islamic soldiers. The vanquished Muslims were forced to watch as Christians beheaded every family member, and only then sent the soldiers headless to the devil. When everyone else was dead, the three kings took turns stabbing and slicing the general through every extremity, and as the Christians cheered, the Crusader kings carved a face into his head.
But Mamluks of ever greater ferocity charged next through the mouth, the bejeweled Turkic elegance of their uniforms betokening artistic cruelty. And as the Mamluks fought, their sickles expertly stripped through the chains of crusader uniforms, then through their clothes, and then their skin - not just small appendages but entire bodies, sliced throufh like skin on a sunfish. Many Christians fought the rest of the battle as jellies of meat. Those Christians left artisanally unbutchered before surrender were butchered in the execution, vivisected through the waist, their top halfs then impaled on the remaining Roman spikes unused to impale Yeshiva children. The Christian bottom halves were crucified on the old Roman crosses like zealot soldiers.
But all through these horrors came a new, much more modern sort of Briton, not charging through the gate but ambling at a civilized pace. They did not kill, they merely looked on, striken with horror, whispering affront and scandal as the women fainted. Eventually they stopped the butchery with single gunshot. A well dressed spokesperson with a dandyish goatee made a speech about how senseless this bloodshed and tyranny. The formerly victorious soldiers threw down their swords, won over instantly. Other Britons, more silent ones, collected the surrendered weaponry. The spokesman told them that in exchange for these swords they would have ploughs and prosperity. The spokesman walked back through the gate, saying he would return with all the provisions needed for peace. These drab British soldiers sat amid their colorful and newly peaceful brothers. A few minutes of silent waiting passed, and these newly peaceable brothers in humanity began to shrivel and crumble: their uniforms, their strength, their very bodies turned to rot. They no longer could stand, nor breathe, turned quickly to skin and bones, then bones, then dust.
And onto what was once the playground errupted a giant tank, exploding not through the cave but through the wall, which immediately road over all at once there the bodily remnants, the playground, the cave, the mouth, all ground into something flat, and there was no remnant that anything happened. And through the tank's exploded hole emerged thousands of Palestinians pouring out like water from a blown dam - some exclaiming joy, some exclaiming rage.
And then Yitzhak Maier woke up with a scream, waking up his Yeshiva roommate, Benny."
"Yitzhak, come on, it's five thirty in the morning!"
"I'm sorry Benny, I just had the most incredible dream!"
"So did I."
"What was your dream?"
"That I'd get a new roommate who'd shut the fuck up for another hour. GO BACK TO SLEEP!"---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I, AC Charlap, prisoner of soul, jailer to an evil mind, must be called to account. Guilty of every crime in thought and deed, evil in ways from which I deserve no unshackle. Worthy of defeat, horror, disgust, humiliation, daily recital and reminder that I am execration and astonishment, curse and reproach. Let them take pleasure in the wickedness of my punishment, let the wise turn their backs. I am guilty, I have betrayed, I have robbed, spoken slander, perverted and corrupted, I am cause of sin in others, deliberately sinned and forever rationalized it, extorted and exploited the weak, abused trust, deceit, insult, rebellion and defiance against all things of God's earth. Criminal, monster, predator, abomination deserving of curse by day and night, curse when I leave and enter, when I go to bed and when I wake. May I be damned all the days of my life.
I've done my scanty best against brain rotten and character cowardly that Hashem laid ever daily upon martyrdom, and every day learn anew how unworthy I am of His attention, daily lessons imprinted on my mind by blood, my soul by fire, and all who meet me by columns of hot air. Woe unto you, poor reader, this is my confession, my endeavor at atonement forever insufficient to the dimension of my crimes, my attempt at explanation against the vanity that there ever can be understanding for my perverse heart.
I know not if there is any bravery within me for what ought follow. What I know is that the words dictate themselves to me by the encyclopedia, thought upon thought, quid upon quo, benumbing my brain of agency until every notion and form and energy of the world seems revealed by my mind QED, past and future, visible and invisible, present met and present avoided, following me at every step, haunting me with voice upon voice, image upon image, to my horror a labyrinth whose infinite reach never ceases.
Do others see within my eyes what my eyes see? Do they betray my exhaustion as I gaze into worlds beyond the world, dimensions between and/or beyond the third and fourth, infinite dimensions where my mind half exists if what exists at all within that half-mind could ever be called a mind? Is rebellion possible? Is there any space within this correctional borstal of infinite chambers where I may be Evan? I so doubt it, because within its every crooked artery, voices dictate words and sounds and images and meanings to me from the unbounded thoroughfares of the ether. What individual responsibility can there be within a self that carved it into hollowness and wholesale replaced by a second brain? And yet does this mind not have anything but responsibility for its evil noise and action. Whomever whatever responsible, I fasten on bonded shackles to its dictations which conduit through me like music through a stereo. I am not Evan, I am AC Charlap, and his life, not mine, is an eternal kaleidoscope of unbidden thought, to which the fleshly Evan is as insufficient as a social media profile is to a corporeal essence. Whether me or him, holy motherfucking shirtballs I’m bad.
There is nothing but trepidation for anything which follows. I don’t know, as I’ll say many times through this epic of narcissism, whether I have any temerity for what comes. I hold within my fingers the power to ruin not only my life but many more and many I love, and yet were it not written, their lives may be ruined by not telling truth.
In our era of middle-early internet, telling ‘my’ truth is a desire so common and misplaced. Falsity bakes itself into the sentence. It wears its presumption with conceit that ‘my’ truth is not in fact the truth, yet such are languages’ vagaries that even though it wears deceit like a medal of valour, we persist in claiming ‘my truth’ is THE truth, unvarnished, unalterable, uncontextualized, uncontroverted, personal comprehension identical to unerring accuracy, and a hundred thousand stories of unintentioned cruelty are elevated from exploitation to abuse, abuse to violence, violence to rape, rape to slaughter. Some rest while others wander, some live in harmony while others are harried, but like sheep, we await judgement until the day when the verdict is inscribed, and others believe proof acquired merely by leveled accusation. Therefore, here I am, prepared my life long to accuse myself before God and the World.
Some villains are born, many are made, and if they are villains, they have no recourse but take their vengeance, and they will fight for a less just world, because they know that any just world leads to their punishment, a punishment which may be unjust in its severity even if the fact of their punishment is itself just. This is the proof positive that the accused are villains, and those who accept their punishment without disputation are not truly villains, and yet they are the only ones who shall be punished like villains.
This is anything but an attempt at vengeance, it is an attempt at truth, and god knows it’s not my truth, it is truth bidden me by a second self whom I assure you is not me, yet is within me and refuses expulsion - the more stubbornly I wrestle it, the more it resists traction. It adjusts to every correction and every new assuaging from humdrum reality that life is placid and calm, and meets it thirty-six hours later with seemingly incontrovertible logic that life, certainly my life, is tragic as it seems. I work and I wait and I work and I wait, but I am as outcast from sanity’s Eden as Cain and Ishmael. Vengeance is for those who can identify the villain, but for those of us for whom the villain has disappeared for thirty-five years, how can one locate a villain when all that is left of him is half a lifetime’s worth of emotional vilguch? What matters he when the story is not his but mine? I am almost thirty-nine years old, and like Jack Benny in reverse I’ve been thirty-nine from as young as I can remember. Some of us are born old, and for some, life dispatches us quickly through the seven ages of man. And then there are those lucky few like me to whom both happen, and by the time we are thirty-nine we have lived our biblical threescore and ten.
I am just a few pages in, and yet this confession is already so weighty upon me that I worry I have no fortitude to continue. Perhaps, as so many millions of Jews do, we just find a way to keep going. There’s no shortcut through the synagogue. Man is born to toil and created to work with his own hands, and this is my only work. I plow no field, I tend no flock, I’ve turned to my own way. God tells me my way has been so demonstrably evil for so long, and I heartily agree with him.
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