Introduction - Removing the Shells
When Rabbi Aluf, Bilhah Reuven, and I established "The Degeneration of the Nation" about half a year ago as a platform for anonymous writers, who create under the liberation that anonymity allows, we were thrilled at the opportunity to recruit an "anonymous celebrity" like Black Circle for the site. Although unlike us, who are presumably known to some readers under other names (particularly from writing in "Haaretz"), Circle has never been exposed even to us or attended an editorial meeting, it's hard to say we regretted the decision. Even today, most of the organic traffic flowing to the site comes from searches clearly related to Black Circle, and these are the most popular contents on the site, and Circle has fully cooperated with even the most capricious editorial guidelines (affirmative action for cats! This is in contrast to his dog-biased writing in the past).
On the other hand, and for an unclear reason - which might still be revealed below - Circle has received negative sentiment that no other writer has received, including the biting review writer Kalbata [female dog]. For example, he is the only one among the writers who has been subjected to repeated harassment that led to the deletion of his posts on Facebook (hate speech!) and eventually even managed to bring about the deletion of his profile. When it comes to a writer who has never taken part in any literary field politics and has not stuck his nose out of the four cubits of dreaming - this is an achievement. The last heated discussion that dealt with Circle's writing, in which he received compliments such as "stink bomb" (von Shiloach), "ugliness" (Eisental), "real stammering" (Y.Z. Meir), and this regarding one of the most virtuosic and original writers in our contemporary literature, prompted me to try to decipher this riddle.
But before dealing with the main issue - I will deal with removing the trivial that seems to wrap every literary-critical discussion in our days. The biographical-psychological analysis of his writing (a schizoid with paranoid personality disorder and a shtreimel complex? A weak man with a strong breast complex?) and the social-sociological analysis (an ultra-Orthodox pretending for his obscure reasons to be secular? A secular pretending for his even more obscure reasons to be ultra-Orthodox? A person pretending to be a cat for obvious reasons?) are of no literary importance. In fact, Circle's writing itself ridicules any such discussion, because what is supposedly done in secret and in darkness - he does openly and declaredly and in broad daylight (and who else but Circle is busy with these light-and-shadow games in his self-image, to the point of exhausting exaggeration?).
The Idra and the Circle's Group
Before I proceed to crack the riddle, I will admit without shame that the initial encounter with Circle's books also put me in an unusual hermeneutic confusion. Beyond the critical question of good and bad, the initial feeling was that Circle's writing is foreign and strange and exceptional by any measure, and not just in the limited context of our literature. With great difficulty, I managed to decipher even the most general plot in the two books ("Book of Darkness" - the crisis of his marriage and his escape from his wife to the world of imagination under the auspices of an unstable and charismatic Rebbe, while developing messianic expectations from the birth of his son. "Future Form" - social ostracism and a mystical odyssey that ends in cosmic and personal breakdown with the discovery of his son's illness). There is no doubt that neither the autobiographical component (obscured and muddled beyond measure) nor the plot (no less muddled) and not even the background world (whose muddling is its essence) are at the basis of this unique literature - which created for itself not only an alternative reality of its own but also its own genre.
The initial key I found to deciphering Circle's writing was shifting the question from his religious affiliation to his spiritual affiliation. The fruitful question for understanding the text is not whether Black Circle is ultra-Orthodox/secular/a forced ultra-Orthodox hiding a secular inside/a forced secular hiding an ultra-Orthodox inside - but: Is the author a heretic? Do the playfulness and breaking of conventions in the book express, as all critics have written (for example, Prof. Rosen-Zvi), heresy and a crisis of faith? In my opinion, this is the main interpretive failure in understanding the dream universe created in the various books, some of which are only available on the "Publication to Darkness" website (and I confess that I haven't read everything, as it's an extensive corpus that doesn't easily lend itself to deciphering).
Well, a reading that doesn't suffer from previous interpretive biases, built on extra-textual expectations, will lead to a clear conclusion: Black Circle is not a heretic. The exact opposite is true - this is a person with strong religious aspirations (some of which are absurd in my eyes), and in one word: a mystic. This is a writer who sees himself as part of a tradition of boundary-breaking, visionary, fantastic, esoteric, sometimes impenetrable mystical writing, and yes - one that integrally and inseparably includes biographical and narrative components. The closest example known to the general public is the tales of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who also disguised his innovation under the guise of ancient tales, just as our author (person? group?) hides behind "I dreamed that-" and the world of dreams.
Once this penny drops, suddenly all the other pieces of the puzzle fall into place: the choice of the dream genre, the pseudoepigraphic writing, full of Kabbalistic symbols and allusions, the obsessive and shameless preoccupation with Eden and Hell and other higher worlds, the disregard for Halacha, the audacity in dealing with the figure of God, the sectarianism and esotericism (it often seems that the writing is not intended for an audience at all but for imaginary initiates), the confrontation with the Hasidic world, and the numerous visions - yes, visions! - that fill the text. The writer, by the way, doesn't hide for a moment his megalomaniacal and somewhat crazy goals. In one central place, he explains the source of the name he chose: "Book of Darkness - the spiritual answer to the Book of Zohar".
The Mystical Anxiety - or the Fear of Dying at 38
The above solution is so obvious that the opposite question is already being asked: why hasn't any critic noticed this so far? The answer can only be one: the author's religiosity is so deviant, so anti-orthodox and unfamiliar to us, and so extreme both in its innovation and ambition and in its cheeky (and sometimes empty and embarrassing) pretentiousness, that it's hard to even imagine that he means what he says. But he does mean it - and how. Hence, the most interesting question for deciphering Circle's world is not merely a literary question, but a religious one: what is the religious world of this deviant - or innovative - mystic, and what is the connection between it and his unique poetics and his hiding behind a Unicode symbol.
Let's start with the obvious: Circle's writings are full of neurotic anxiety, severe paranoia, insecurity, fears of divine punishment, concealment and games of concealment, disguising innovation under playfulness, and "as if". The writer is consumed by fears of his own ambition, and the punishments promised for it in Kabbalistic literature, but his urge overcomes him. Again and again, he chooses daring: bold and even reckless innovations in the picture of the cosmic worlds, from which emerges a very unstable image of them. The world of Hasidism and Kabbalah may be his raw materials, but he is not committed to any accepted cosmogony arising from them. He devotes extensive attention to his mystical ars poetica, from which it emerges that the extensive destruction of the mystical worlds is not his own doing, but the result of an event that he sees as having extensive mystical and cosmogonic significance, and which stands at the basis of his motivation as a mystic: the Holocaust.
From Circle's perspective, the Holocaust is not a historical catastrophe, but primarily a religious and spiritual catastrophe. It's a total Kabbalistic upheaval, a kind of year zero for divinity and Judaism, after which nothing remains and can remain as it was, and "the Zohar" is replaced by "darkness". In the upper worlds, to which (in his eyes) he has direct and unapologetic access, it's a cataclysmic moment, after which the world changed fundamentally and irreversibly, and therefore afterwards there is a need for extensive spiritual innovation (in parentheses: thus also technological innovations receive far-reaching spiritual meanings).
This innovation is at the root of the wide and complex mystical universe that the writer created in the enormous corpus on his website, in his personal way hiding behind half-jokes (he refers to himself as "the king's jester") - a world that is no less in size (unlike in value) than the world of Zoharic Kabbalah, and whose guiding principles are discussed at length by the writer himself in many places (and awaits research to decipher them in detail). The two basic forces that Freud identified in dream creation act powerfully on the writer, but their source stems from his mystical anxiety. On the one hand, an eruption of libidinal desire for mystical creativity, expressed in boundless freedom towards heaven to the point of exaggeration and ridicule, and on the other hand anxious censorship, which indeed causes the innovation to be disguised in ridicule, jest, confusion and concealment - and even the very choice to publish the text as literature (a disguise that paradoxically contributes to the noticeable literary qualities of the text!). But in principle, there's no great innovation here: the tension between daring and esotericism acts on every mystic - great and small.
From here, we will not find it difficult to locate the reason why Black Circle is hiding. It's not a biographical matter (or not mainly and necessarily), but a poetic one. A person writing a replacement for the Book of Zohar cannot afford to be exposed, just as Ramadal could not be exposed as Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai. And hence, apparently, the enormous instinctive hostility that Circle arouses among authentic religious people. Heresy wouldn't have tickled anyone, but writing a new Kabbalah? One cannot help but feel repulsion and rejection towards a writer whose ambition this is.
The Doctrine of Darkness
It is not the concern of this short article to decipher in detail the mystical worldview of the author of "Book of Darkness", who is hostile to both traditional Kabbalah and Halacha, but makes extensive use of their ruins in his symbols and buildings, and repeatedly tries to formulate his worldview in countless changing images - to the point of exhaustion. The Holocaust catastrophe is referred to by him as "the breaking of the lights", more destructive than "the breaking of the vessels", and recurs again and again in images of destruction of the upper worlds, of Eden and even of Hell, and the replacement of lights with darkness. This catastrophic cosmic breaking leads to a new and messianic status of the vessels themselves, which are identified precisely with the manifestations of technology - to which the author attributes far-reaching redemptive and eschatological meanings (for example, he identifies the sefirah of Malchut with the Internet - no less!).
Unlike traditional mystics, the search for the experience of closeness to God does not motivate the author at all. The personal divinity itself is absent from his fertile mystical world, except in particularly parodic and degrading manifestations, so that his world can be called: Kabbalah without God. The sefirah of Keter, for example, is identified by him with the shtreimel, whose paradoxical essence stems from it being a network of tails precisely, supreme on the head - and it's clear that this is a semi-humorous symbol. The author is extremely hostile to personal religious practices such as prayer, fundamental frameworks such as the Jewish home and community, and basic religious experiences such as acceptance of the yoke and fear of Heaven (of which he doesn't have even a smidgen). The main religious practice he offers is - of course - writing dreams, and there's no doubt that he performs it diligently, and it is the key in his eyes to renewing the petrified Jewish mystical creativity. In this, he is a classic example of a mystic who does not follow the ways of tradition, and therefore builds worlds of falsehood from its perspective (and even takes pride in it).
But why did the author choose precisely the dream, and precisely literature, and one directed at the secular world, as the medium for his deviant world, whose underlying motivation is primarily religious? Perhaps for the same reason he chose the world of secrets to be the axis around which his world revolves. It can only be that he himself is unable to admit to himself and explicitly formulate his perverse stance towards Jewish tradition. Hence his attempt to be a guest in the realm of literature - but also his remaining a foreign plant within it. And hence also his hiding behind the dream, and therefore the password sign is also fitting for him - because his essence is his concealment. It's possible that Black Circle is hiding from us, or from God, or from the religious community, but even more so - he is hiding mainly from himself.