Myth of Arrival

Paul Hanson — bassoon, clarinet
Daniel Hoffman — violin
Kevin Mummey — dumbeg, zarb
Moses Sedler — cello

These are the members of the band Davka. I became interested in the group because the jazz bassoon is one instrument I am trying to enjoy of late. Davka successfully uses a jazz bassoon in its music and released a CD a while ago, one that I keep going back to, Der Golem. It is a modern soundtrack to the silent 1920 German film of the same name directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese.

Though the legend of the golem comes from Kabbalistic sources, I have never really been interested in religion; spirituality, however, endlessly fascinates me. To put it slightly differently, it is not the new structures people throw together at a given notice I am drawn to, but the ancient earth that the structures sit on. I am not even talking about the difference between old gods and new, rather the chemical elements the myths are drawn from.

What about this myth interests me? I have been reading about MSF, Medecins sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders, lately. Their goals are simple: Feel the suffering with our own hands. Witness everything as you bring food, water, latrines and medicine. From witnessing humanitarian disaster comes the urge to assist, to help, to lend aide. So it is when I have time enough to let my mind wander that I turn to these ancient building blocks for some sort of rescue.

Perhaps I need rescuing at times, just like everyone? I am fatalistic about my future. Like the short life of the golem, pulled into existance only to carry out a mission and then be released, I found in Psalm 139:16 the following:

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

I like the predestination of that sentence. All the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. My unformed substance. The river clay Rabbi Loew, the Lion of Prague, used to craft the golem. I like the idea of creating something, some thing, that will be used as a shield against the harsh nature of this world. The harsh truth that there are others who wish us ill; that because of your size or shape or skin color or the placement of certain bodily organs, because of nothing more than the way you pronounce words, men will kill you in the most brutal ways imaginable.

Is it not surprising that we imagine alternatives to such practices? We imagine new myths to fight against such horrors. Jorge Luis Borges wrote:

… the Golem legends are in no way absurd but rather part of a doctrine that is worthy of attention: that there is in each of us a particle of the Divine.

It is from that particle I now draw. I have shaped the river clay into a form, I have placed the stone with the Hebrew word for life into the form's mouth, I have spoken the words of power to activate the form.

I call this form Na'arah. It is important to know what you say when you name something. Names hold power. I am sick to the soul of cultures that constrain others, that are so controlling that the mere name itself defines the enslavement. However, under the right conditions, the masters claim, they have their use. Take the word na'arah, in Hebrew:

[It] means "young woman" or "girl." It … implies not so much age (before or after puberty) or sexual status such as "virgin" but social status, i.e., "unmarried." Like its masculine likeness Na'ar, it refers to a servant (for examples see: Gen 24:61; Ex 2:5; 1 Sam 25:42; Pr 9:3 etc.)

So here I am in my own words, committing the same sin by subjugating the female golem, the girl of clay, Na'arah. Here I am naming her as servant. It is an interesting contradiction, paradox, irony, one that is not lost on me. The question is not am I doing this for noble reasons, all causes seem noble to someone, somewhere. No. The question I cannot answer is will I have the wisdom to stop once I begin uttering these terrible words?

I am a slave to words, I hear bizarre
noises and turn them to meaning. Listen:
you are like her, you pray to a savior
that winks at fiends, too. All evil; klansmen,
cops, thugs, pray to your god too, the human
need for self-pity. But what if we had
acted? Molded the river clay, spoken
the old Hebrew, commanded the unclad
puppet to life? A girl golem? A tad
freakish, perhaps, a tad rude, but ready
to stand between us and madmen, that mad
blood lust that possesses men. What mighty
words moved her? None. No, one. O no one, O
Na'arah. O lump, now move, O now go …

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 1:12 pm and is filed under Original Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.