On the Childish Grandfather and the Child Prodigy Who Never Grew Up: Why Did Yehuda Wizen Choose the Wrong Life's Work?
Recently, I asked my great-grandfather, a charming lad approaching a hundred, what he thought about Ukraine. He apologized for his "egoism" and said that at his age, these things no longer interest him, and that he had already seen many such events. Then, a characteristic witticism came out of him: "My future - lies behind me. But your past - lies ahead of you." This reminded me of the disappointment caused by the latest issue of Dachak recently released online, and of a contradiction I always feel in the editor's soul (whom I've never met, of course): on one hand, he's such a grandfather, and on the other hand, he's such a child. A bit like in the tale of the seven beggars: "And I am very old, and yet I am very young, and I haven't even begun to live at all. And even so, I am very old." Yes, a kind of contradiction, like "true radicalism is conservatism." And so, out of a certain irritation with those approximately 600 pages, which I used to look forward to, and which again mostly didn't justify themselves, I decided to decipher for myself what exactly weighs on Dachak. And on Wizen. And what weighs on me in the recent issues (books?).
First of all, let's clear the table. The political matter, or the conservative one, whatever you call it - it's not the reason people read Dachak, and although Wizen has recently made headlines with it, it mainly evokes a yawn in me, much like how my grandfather thinks about the current war, which was already the previous war, which even then was the war before. Here Wizen more or less aligns with opinion leaders like Assaf Sagiv and Yigal Librant, who feel like great radicals because they oppose radicalism, from a conservative stance, and rail against the culture of PC and cancel culture and the hollow television left. I must admit that Wizen's and the aforementioned's political stance is far from exciting me as much as it excites them, precisely because I'm not far from it. But the real problem isn't political but literary: its self-excited "boldness" - and somewhat childish - is far from innovating or interesting from a poetic perspective, and as much as it might sadden him, they haven't yet imprisoned Wizen in a zoo like Pound (by the way, I can't think of many real intellectuals, in the younger age group, who remain in the scarecrow liberal left against which Wizen fights. The conservative and traditional and "dark" sentiment is the bon ton, at least among those who don't see Haaretz as any measure of "culture and literature". After all, this newspaper is a spiritual corpse, albeit with a glorious past, and there's no point in kicking a body. Wizen is essentially fighting against an American phenomenon, not a Hebrew one, which everyone despises. So you've added a monarchist flavor or a fascist flirtation or an anti-Enlightenment illumination? Nu, tov. Armchair radicalism befits a poet and an adolescent, hopefully without mixing the two).
Seemingly, one cannot ignore the dream team Wizen has assembled in the journal, and each time anew I expect to discover what they've written. Jonathan Levy and Yehuda Wizen himself are our two greatest poets in the current generation (in the next generation, by the way, I have hopes for Foker, who was not coincidentally discovered in the competing journal. Neo-Buchbut, when he frees himself from the immaturity of big words and the kitsch of adolescence - the symptom of "blood" and "fire" - is another leading candidate). Amnon Navot - our greatest critic in the current generation (and the fact that he's deceased only reflects the state of criticism, RIP). Aharon Shabtai - the greatest living poet. Yochai Oppenheimer - a critic with great potential, perhaps only surpassed by Assaf Inbari and Orin Morris, and it seems not by chance that both write very little nowadays (interestingly, Dachak's only discovery was in the field of criticism). Tzur Ehrlich - a particularly delightful virtuoso translator. Michal Wizen (his wife) - she's a genius in the right sense of the word, in the field of philosophical research (which is, by the way, very different from philosophy). In fact, the engagement with Hegel is remembered as the intellectual peak of the journal (and the questionnaire on the subject for the great researchers in the field - as an impressive tour de force). As a continuation of this, the journal interviewed - in a kind of dazzling Israeli chutzpah - some of the world's leading intellectuals and philosophers.
But precisely because of all this (and more), I have an increasing sense of missed opportunity - and from the only Hebrew journal in which I placed my hopes for our literature. After all: what does all this greatness end up with in the end? Where, for example, is the new style that Wizen has been yearning for for years? What masterpiece has come out of Dachak, what genre innovation, or literary discovery? All the components and ingredients are here, and many of them, so where's the cake? The journal aspires to be "a center that is forming and will form by virtue of its textual weight alone. By virtue of the critical mass." If so, where's the nuclear explosion? Where is the fulfillment of the child prodigy's promise - where is the literary breakthrough?
Elisheva Samet-Shinberg is a literary researcher with merits - but her increasingly close connection to Wizen feels increasingly destructive to the latter, and it's also a sad symptom of his state as a creator. When I think about J. Levy and Y. Wizen, more than anything I want to lift my skirt a bit and give these two a good kick in the ass, so they'll each sit on their ass and try to write the great Israeli epic, or create the poetic style suitable for the information age, or compose the great Jewish poem dealing with the Holocaust (yes, "Joy of the Poor" is joy of the poor. And Uri Zvi Greenberg's exhibit...). Isn't it time for a real spiritual-poetic response to the second big bang of Judaism? (Here, take an example from the greatest Jewish theologian currently active, and one of the last intellectual giants operating in our culture - Yishai Mevorach - whose destructive and dazzling thought will yet bury Judaism, when its power is revealed to the masses in the generation after ours. Because he understands: the Holocaust is the central question. The Holocaust is the central question. The Holocaust is the central question. And nothing will help. You can't escape it, if you're operating in the realms of Hebrew culture, that is, in the realm of Jewish culture). Another witty poem about some socio-literary phenomenon of featherweight... Are we lacking "big" subjects crying out for poetic - and even mythical - treatment of value?
Wizen has been so busy lately with his necrophilic hammer (and not infrequently it's indeed literary corpses, deserving of the grave and not of rummaging in it), that he's fallen into an internal contradiction, which is ultimately characteristic of all narcissism that relies on the cult of fathers and great-grandfathers, in order to aggrandize the self and rise above the present (and repress the future: the real repression). If the ancient forms are so important and fruitful, why don't you do as the ancients did? Why do you write only parodic epics of a company vacation in Eilat, and consciously cowardly dodge (yes, he also has such a poem) with flimsy excuses and faintheartedness (he, the blunt and brave) from writing a real epic? Come on, deal with it. Come deal in the field of the big and strong, instead of crushing the small and kicking the weak and slapping the girls (Wizen's habit in scathing reviews is among his least charming traits... Who even bothers to write a review of a creator they don't appreciate? As anyone who has experienced any kind of relationship knows, criticism is worthy within a framework of love, and as an expression of hate it is tasteless and even baseless - and ignoring it is much more effective and ethical. Why would someone read someone they don't like? If I detest something - maybe it's not for me. And maybe I even have enough humility to think that maybe it's for someone else, and that there's a right to exist in the universe even for things that aren't for me. And yes, there's a difference between the spiritual - and even literary - world of women and men. That's why I love Wizen as a poet - and less as a critic. I love my critics - not to mention my men - gentlemen. Good criticism is always an act of love, and not because it's "good criticism". The condition for "he who spares his rod hates his son" - is love for the child...).
Contrary to the game of thrones taking place in Wizen and Frishman's imagination, the place from which criticism comes, in any field, shouldn't be the present of the field (and its masculine struggles for hegemony) - but its future. And the future simply won't read anything that doesn't innovate. It's that simple. So we'll ask: Does Wizen innovate enough? (Yes yes, nudnik, within the framework of sophisticated use of past forms and from deep familiarity with the history of culture and all its layers, including a marginal Haskalah poet even in his time, who of course by virtue of his antiquity and his archaic and non-colloquial, that is, rich language, causes you great inspiration from which comes out... great poetry?). You know what, okay fine, beat everyone up, but do you have one great work behind you that would justify this? What do you propose, practically (and not as a vague program on how literature should be, and what its sources of inspiration should be... aesthetics and ars poetica like sand and nothing to eat)?
Well, Dachak also takes the time to offer us a religious-national agenda. On the religious side, Wizen plays the educated Litvak, and therefore the religious libido there tends to zero, and so we'll never receive in the journal (the literary one!) the exemplary literary richness of the world of mysticism and Hasidism (which Wizen detests - and of course doesn't forget to get excited about) - which is the strongest literary creation the Jewish world has produced in the last millennium (much more than the poetry of Spain) - but ideological poverty and secondary/research literature, or secondary-research. And as with the religious nationalists, when you're essentially secular, your religion - or your Judaism section - is just a maid and slave to what really interests you: the Knesset channel, or the political-national level. This part, the political one, is usually more interesting, probably because it's more interesting to the editor. But in general, there's something a bit heartbreaking about the oxymoron in the prevalent conservative excitement about innovations and innovators in conservative thinking, or about the great conservative thinkers, who are the great revolutionaries in conservative thinking... (a true authentic conservative would say that conservatism is true conservatism and not that conservatism is true radicalism, like in Dachak's motto. Have we heard an ultra-Orthodox claiming that ultra-Orthodoxy is true secularism?). Not to mention the Dachakic adoration of radical conservatives specifically, which more than being dachka [a pun on "pressure"], it also demonstrates some fundamental aesthetic paradox.
Is there a chance that even the classicists weren't classicists, but the trailblazers of their time, and not its conservatives, who have long been forgotten? And is Dachak's struggle against forgetting, or is it a struggle against time itself, "in pursuit of the lost manuscript", and therefore so Don Quixotic? What really causes people not to be forgotten - as opposed to Dachak's Sisyphean choice to make us not forget? Could it be that forgetting is the long-term cure for our cultural condition, and not its disease? Could it be that the brain needs to forget, necessarily, in order to truly learn something new, and that this isn't a bug of culture but a feature? And finally, isn't forgetting crueler than any criticism, and therefore much more effective than it and all its struggles, which precisely no one will remember? Isn't the yawn a much stronger force than the sword, because it kills creators gently? Not with noise and not with fire is the future of literature - but with a still small voice. But then, why do we need to fight (or try to recreate - without an opponent! - some fight from the period when there was a hole in rhyme and we took out)? Is the fight, in the field of literature, the way leading to becoming an alpha male, or perhaps there's a need for something else? I have been very jealous for Hebrew culture, for the children of Israel have forsaken your literature, they have thrown down your publications, and slain your poets, and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away...
What else does Dachak offer us? If we've already yawned (and yawning is the most authentic conservative soul movement, hence the connection of conservatism to cats...), let's move to the main field of literature in our culture today: the field of contemporary prose has always been a weakness of Dachak - and of Wizen personally (open your eyes. It's okay), but still some of the more esteemed creators in our places wrote there (not by me. Sorry). Here too the fundamental problem is poetic: in the current culture, the field of prose suffers from an excess of conservatism and fixation and establishment on the classical form and its achievements and its pompous language (the novel), while poetry suffers from an excess of cheap liberation and radicalism and disintegration from any standard whatsoever. Therefore, poetry in our days has turned into (bad) prose - while prose has turned into (bad) poetry. And therefore Dachak's strategy for renewing poetry acts as a bad tactic in the field of prose (as a symptom: a review by Amnon Navot will always lead to licking fingers from the blood in the honey, but he's stuck on a very specific ideal of a realistic social novel whose language is as rich as a tycoon and fattened with oil. Therefore he's very good, like Wizen, at saying what not, and not - what yes. Which is after all a slightly greater wisdom... And I wish these two would write prose like they write criticism, like I wish Oded Carmeli would write poetry like he writes the satirical introduction in Hava LeHaba. Unfortunately, the symptom of our generation is that criticism is wittier and more interesting than literature, because literature must be high and serious, and only criticism can be playful - and serious).
Even the traditional critical slaughter, which seals Dachak like a sacrifice in Girard, originates from a lack of faith in the judgment of the future, and an attempt to replace its cruelty, which knows no faces - with your cruelty (which does know). But the future is both the judge and the executioner - not you. Are you a Foucauldian in disguise? Do you not really believe in the authenticity of aesthetic taste, but only in power relations, and therefore think that taste is determined by power, and therefore there's a point in fighting for it with all your might? Rest. Don't replace the aesthetic struggle with a political one. It's not wise to be a hero in war, that is, in criticism. Come be a great hero - in creation. And don't replace aesthetic boldness with political boldness for me - it's a pathetic mechanism and we can see through you. Is the very fact that criticism in Dachak is often the most daring, enjoyable and successful original literary creation in it, not indicative of creative libido and dark energies channeled into field intrigues instead of into the depths of literary work itself? Didn't you understand that Céline or Pound are remembered despite their political nonsense, and not because of it? They knew how to channel their psychosis into their work, and didn't feel bold just because they declare (bravely!) that they're psycho, and tilt their ear to hear echoes of outcries against them. Of course, criticism in Dachak always misses in every phenomenon, because it has no empathy (too feminine a trait?), which is the key to understanding. Therefore it's terribly fun, as a creation, but one should never refer to it as a guide, that is, as criticism. Therefore it's a show, even if not of the high Greek kind, but the low Roman kind. Slaughter as entertainment. And it is indeed endlessly entertaining (to the bystander), but it's only shallow entertainment, and doesn't dive and reach deep insights. The critical stance in Dachak is as complex as a placard.
And what opens the journal? The individual poems. The very individual. But in the current state of Hebrew literature, not even a single good poem, and not even a huge collection of such - will save it. The individual poem - is dead, and has lost all meaning. Whether out of awareness of this or not, Wizen anyway writes very little, for he consumes his energy and time on the politics of literature, and doesn't forget accounts from the days of Arlosoroff's murder and the elimination of Gedaliah son of Ahikam. And from so much not going out into the world and dealing with it, but being entirely "in the world of literature", his writing and world have become hermetic and confined in a closed circle, and with time he writes more and more about literature - instead of writing literature... about the world. And if he deals with something, it's with another kind of politics, the one on television, which is even more worthless in the long run, which is the run of literature. What is commonly called - eternity, and is actually the range in which the future reads you. Of course poetry can be political, but are we here in the opposite situation? Are you a poet or are you a politician?
Our culture is in a state where good works, even many, won't help it anymore, but only one truly great work. Only a masterpiece will raise the Shekhinah from its dust. But when did Wizen try or will try to write this work? When did he really take a risk? If your hero is Aharon Shabtai, when did you try to write something on the scale of his seven poems? And Jonathan Levy, the mythical shamanic virtuoso, when did he pick up the gauntlet? Are a journal or a newspaper supplement the right stage for these two, and for Hebrew literature in general, or perhaps this is part of the problem? In the current crisis, a journal is in itself an anachronistic and poetically destructive idea, because its collecting nature, suitable for our time as a collection of unrelated posts in the Facebook feed, is by nature all that is problematic and bad in contemporary writing. Isn't it a shame for all the tremendous effort, invested in escaping confrontation - instead of in confrontation?
Even if Wizen writes a thousand good poems twice - they will not amount to anything, and his influence on the future of Hebrew poetry will ultimately amount to nothing, if he does not write one great and cumulative work. All the blood he shed - will be in vain. All the wars - will end as wars always end, with culture being the loser. Jonathan Levy will juggle in the air, but what will remain of the magic, when future generations will need a dictionary and footnotes to understand contemporary references and slang, similar to the poets of the Enlightenment? And why doesn't he develop more the composition and plot, so that his works connect to a whole, isn't it a waste of tremendous, once-in-a-lifetime talent? This problem, of creating wholes from disassembled works, is the great poetic problem of our time - the problem of the generation - and we have already discussed this at length in our reviews. An extreme example of this is "Awake, Brothers", in which from Levy's golden language, which is truly bewitching, a straw plot of conflict-sci-fi-trash is woven, and countless pearls and diamonds connect to an intentionally sloppy fabric. Each section separately - a masterpiece and cast concrete, but precisely the whole - holds a little less water. The wild imagination's delight in itself, which does wonders up to the chapter level - is exactly what unravels and disrupts everything at the level of the overall work (a more promising direction is actually a contradiction between the particular and the whole - and between tactics and strategy: just as Kafka succeeds in a fantastic plot precisely because the texture is realistic, it's better to choose a tight realistic plot framework to hold together the wild fantastic texture. And if we want a schema, classical realism of the 19th century was a perfect and strict match between tactics and strategy, modernism was the liberation of strategy but maintaining strict tactics - and therefore had a fertile tension created from the contradiction between them, while postmodernism was again a match between liberation in tactics and also in strategy - which dismantled everything, and the next stage - the future - is to combine liberation in tactics with renewed strictness in strategy. And not to go back to modernism as Wizen mistakenly does, due to lack of vision - not talent).
The result of all this is that "Awake, Brothers" is a work that is terribly fun to read but not convincing enough. Not to mention the ideological-political side of the plot, where one can read the work as a parody of the left's imaginary, in which the Palestinians are embedded, as an a priori assumption, in the role of the most passive victim possible to try to imagine: prisoners forcibly put to sleep for eternity. And who will raise you from your dust, Malchitavos? (Levy's masterpiece, and the only thing that came out of Dachak worthy of being a candidate for a masterpiece for generations. And yes, it's especially important for a great creator to think about this range - and aim for it. If not him, who?). Another generation or two, who will know who Tshuvah was, and what answer will you give on Judgment Day. Who was Saddam Hussein at all? Who is Raful?... And in general, what's with you all the time about politics, boys? We've long stopped looking for alpha males. If you want to move literature - give it what it needs. Politics is by definition the matter of the present, not the future, and it's not "going big", as Wizen quotes Avidan (who actually did respond to the future...), on the contrary. It's "going small".
The problem with Dachak is the lack of proper context for the action, which makes it ineffective, disconnected, full throttle in neutral. Wizen has a complete lack of understanding of who his readers are. There is no Hebrew culture in the present. Dead. There is only a culture of the future. And why would the future be interested in Wizen, why would it read him? Did Wizen take an interest in the future? Is he actually writing for the Wizen of the future, who will discover the Wizen of the present, who discovered the Wizen of the past? In other words, is he actually writing to himself from within himself about himself - and a bit too preoccupied with himself? Is "Dachak" a journal for the renewal of literature or a respectable shelf product designed to mark its editor as a poet-editor who has the biggest of all, and therefore instead of being concise and concentrated it is built like a man's organ, that is, as an ego, and therefore preferably as inflated as possible? What exactly is this product, "Dachak", and what is its role in our (literary?) salon? Is it appropriate to renew the expression "conspicuous consumption" and replace it with "conspicuous editing"? Is this the matter, arrogance and ostentation? Is this the literary equivalent of an SUV designed to compensate for low poetic potency (about a dozen poems a year)? I think the answer to all these questions is no, but I'm starting to hear them buzzing in my head more and more, with each issue that's half a tree. After all, I came to write about Dachak and found myself writing about Wizen. Is this because the editor's ego is the only organizing principle of the journal, or is it me who fell into the author's (oh, sorry, editor's) fallacy? Is Wizen talking to us, or are we just admiring extras, and he's actually talking to himself? (The last successful poem about how hard it is to be smarter than everyone expresses something authentic, albeit of course amused, in his character).
What is the purpose of a journal at all, if not to promote a certain literary trend (for example: a new literary movement), in a local literary context? But Dachak does not try to promote a distinct local literary movement, but literature itself (the "good" one of course), towards some utopian horizon that is not part of it, where the literary method is to its liking. If so, the disappointment is built-in, because Dachak offers us a problem - and not a solution. It is created only from what is behind it, and not towards something real that is ahead of it. It wants to replace the entire literary field, but there is no living literary field in it, but it is mainly a constant and fixed declaration of the death of the field, and the erection of a magnificent mummification pyramid, and hence it is doomed to repeat its conclusions again and again, like Amnon Navot, without development or hope - or future. There are no internal tensions or discussions or competition or surprises or collisions in Dachak, but it is all under the absolute and monolithic control of the editor (monarch?). And perhaps this is where my exaggerated focus on Wizen stems from, because I read Dachak as his personal (editorial) work, and not of any group, or even any aesthetic movement. As a kind of diary (reading?). As a kind of substitute for reading "Culture and Literature" (a supplement that now contains only two things: shame and fig leaves), Dachak offers us a wide and excellent selection of eclectic translations, but again - the eclecticism is part of the problem, not the solution. It seeks to educate, but contains no students and therefore no new learning, and so it is like a teacher speaking into the air, hoping someone will hear. Isn't this a frustrating position? Again and again and again a tasting meal - and I don't feel full. I was enriched and enriched in Dachak's centrifuge, but did I come out richer?
Over the years I have read - if one can even say that, because probably no one has done it, and maybe it's more accurate to say I went through - all the issues of Dachak published online. What do I even remember from them? What accumulated? Not enough. Certainly not in relation to the talent invested and the number of trees uprooted. Indeed, Dachak gives an illusion of breadth of knowledge. But first of all, Dachak is essentially not what Wizen writes - but what Wizen reads, and what interests him. And that's already much less impressive. It means he knows nothing about what's happening "today", because he's so busy with the past. Dachak is still the best literary journal in Israel, by far, but in recent issues it is deteriorating (I'm sure Wizen would love this spelling), and the best issues were actually those in the middle of its activity period. On the other hand, Wizen's own poems are actually improving, and about two-thirds of them are good, and that's a lot for a poet. But neither quantity nor quality are important, but quantity that turns into quality - a long poetic work - and here the child refuses to grow up, and doesn't take on challenges befitting a man, as poets of the past did. Dachak is currently an enterprise approaching 10,000 (there's no extra zero here) pages, but what do all these zeros add up to? After all, there's a lot here to accumulate, isn't there?
What is the difference between periods of cultural flourishing and periods of withering and fading and dying? Talents are distributed equally among the people of all generations. The difference is that the people of one era set themselves, by virtue of their spiritual strength and the strengths of their time, tremendous challenges, and aspire to conquer lofty mountains, and thus culture reaches peaks. When they try to meet the tremendous bar they set for themselves, even if they missed - often a magnificent failure remains. While the people of another era are simply wretches, busy with small things, this one wrote about me so I'll write about him this, and then I'll feel strong and bold (I didn't like him!). Contrary to the Wizenic position, the world is not to blame for the dire state of Hebrew literature. Wizen is to blame. He is the talented one who had no vision - and who wasted his talent in vain on various quarrels, on sharpened insults, on archives and prunings (am I doing this right?), on the joke of publishing the Dachaks and translating past pressures, on donning the identity of a wrestler and fighting identity politics, and all the other nonsense and witticisms that will not be remembered in the future and will not come to mind. And this is really a sad story, whose sin of hubris, along with the fact that the hero is indeed a man of virtue, makes it tragic - one great tragedy he did not write. He didn't even try. He was afraid (wasn't he?). He was afraid that he would not succeed (and who guarantees that he would?), and therefore perhaps preferred to remain the gifted child, the promising one, who will never fulfill the promise, because it's easier to criticize and kill and "educate" others than to do (and in doing so you also risk being killed... and maybe, just maybe, you won't take it in such a sportsmanlike spirit when it comes to something you carved from the root of your soul and risked in an insecure position, not solid like the position of admiring the classics - oh, the audacity!). Yes, it's so easy to be arrogant with what you know about those who don't. After all, any true intellectual of our time would immediately identify here the P!=NP problem (does Wizen even know what that is? No, ha, what an ignoramus who doesn't understand basic things for any contemporary thinker).
And here, we come to the original sin of Dachak, which is arrogance. And not that there's anything wrong with arrogance, and not that it's not needed to differentiate (Wizen is right!), and not that I'm not arrogant (me? not at all), but that the arrogance in Dachak already passes from its constructive manifestation, and becomes another manifestation: arrogance as sin. As a bad trait. As a fetish of pride ("Pride pride!" as they shout at our place). Pride that is busy justifying itself, because it knows it's not really justified (the truly arrogant don't need to be arrogant). And here, finally we are touching the huge elephant in the room, which is the real repressed that Dachak tries with all its might and weight to repress (hence: its disproportionality, characteristic of an inefficient compensation mechanism that got out of control) - and which is the real reason for the cultural pressure.
For what characterizes the intellectuals in the current culture (and this is a global phenomenon, not just Hebrew), and did not characterize the great intellectuals and cultural figures, writers and philosophers from more classical periods (ancient Greece, Renaissance, 19th century) is ignorance - as pride. And it's not about ignorance in the history of their field (as Wizen is sure), but precisely in their being completely ignorant and real dolts in the important fields in our world today. These are not Renaissance men - because Renaissance men knew science, and they are indeed not of the ancients' stature - because the Greeks knew physics, and they would not have entered the Athenian Academy - because they do not know geometry, and they are not philosophers of stature - because philosophers know mathematics (yes, even Wittgenstein). You have to be a kind of deaf-mute fool and child - that is, a contemporary intellectual - to not notice the greatest, most revolutionary thing happening in the world in the last century, and which shapes our culture and lives more than any other force, and which should stand at the center of any real poetic and spiritual confrontation, namely: the computing revolution.
All our intellectual giants simply haven't heard that the greatest spiritual achievement, and with the most decisive influence on our future, of any cultural field in recent centuries, is precisely that of the purest spiritual field: mathematics (and yes, computer science is just a branch in it). And how can you even be a serious intellectual (poet/writer/thinker/newspaper-mumbler) these days without knowing anything - really anything! - about modern mathematics, and how algorithms work, and how a computer works, what are for example the PageRank algorithm (Google's ranking algorithm for you) or Turing machine, or evolutionary algorithms, or Hebb's rule, and backpropagation in deep learning (and not God forbid "artificial intelligence", as donkeys say), and algorithmic game theory, and the fine-tuning problem of nature's constants, and the nature of the connection between chaos and fractals, and complexity classes and the problem of lower bounds in them (the deepest spiritual problem of our time!), and breakthroughs in paleontological history, and lean startup, and the yield curve, h-index, blockchain protocol, one-way functions, Fermi paradox, Shannon's definition of entropy, morphisms and category theory, constructor theory, quantum error correction and quantum information, Cohen forcing and large cardinals and inaccessible cardinals and other mind-boggling ideas in contemporary model theory and set theory, homomorphism and homeomorphism (and homotopy and homology...), membranes and solution landscapes in string theory, Penrose diagrams... How can one, for example, engage in metaphysics today without knowing the jaw-dropping meta-physical insights of Nima Arkani-Hamed (who's that?). Space and time are not a primary phenomenon. There's something underneath.
And this is true for all our writers and poets and intellectuals. If you're not interested in these things and know nothing about them, you're basically a complete idiot who doesn't know anything at all and talks about how the world works, and where the world is going. You know nothing about the future. And you're illiterate in a world that has long been speaking a different language, and that will never be interested in you again - and rightly so. You haven't understood anything about the revolution that is consuming literature itself, the network revolution, and the only thing you know how to do is to entrench yourself in the past, in the ultra-Orthodox style, and be led where others lead you, literature-seculars (and devoid of any cultural baggage, because there's no one to connect the fields. Oh, and you'll surely know how to comment on the vowelization). And no, Eran Hadas, a poet (who also appeared in Dachak) whose concept of the future is drawn from Avidan (the sixties, and the primitive image of computation as language, that is, as combinatorial permutation games) or Oded Carmeli, whose concept of the future is drawn from Star Trek (...The Next Generation? So we've already progressed to the eighties), do not understand this future, which lies not in the realms of language or space, but in the spiritual realm of the network and the learning algorithms that operate in it (did someone say neuroscience?). So it's worth sticking your nose out of archives a bit, and reading in Quanta Magazine (or at least following the YouTube science channels like the PBSs...), to understand something about this world and its future: to be a little less ignorant, and a bit more of a Renaissance man. Because unfortunately, where there is vision - there is no talent. And where there is talent - there is no vision. And this is the real pressure that really kills culture today, and the factor that nullifies to zero the position of "conservatism is the real radicalism". We are in the midst of an unprecedented and irreversible spiritual revolution - and even a young and talented intellectual like Wizen hasn't heard anything about it, didn't know. So how can we expect the creation of a new style that will know how to deal with it poetically? Apparently the style will wait for the next generation.
If so, what is really the source of Dachak's pressure? Is Dachak fleeing to the past so obsessively, because its pressure is actually from the future? After all, Wizen and Navot's argument is actually circular, because they never gave a real account to themselves about the root of the phenomenon, and therefore are unable to deal with it: Literature is deteriorating because the creators are bad and the creators are bad because literature is deteriorating. Poetry is deteriorating because journals are deteriorating because criticism is deteriorating because publishers are deteriorating because the audience is deteriorating because poetry is deteriorating. The institutions are to blame for the decline in standards and the decline in standards is to blame for the decline of institutions. And so on, and on, in an endless circle, they circle around, and from here it's clear that the result is only endless complaints, without the ability to influence the results, because this round snake has no head (Navot went further and identified this head - in Menachem Peri - no less). They are anxious about the very future of literature, but never knew how to deal with this future itself, or at all with the future development of our world, when technological developments are what changed it and also the field from end to end. But technology doesn't really interest them and they have nothing interesting and constructive, not to mention poetic, to say about it. They actually have nothing to say to it, to the future. And therefore they have no future. Only past. And as glorious as possible, if possible. And maybe, just maybe - the real pressure, pushing back, is from the demand of your own talent. For who is the real cultural criminal: the talentless writer who tried, or the one who was blessed with heaven's gift and missed it? If so... another decade for Dachak? Am I looking forward to it? Is this what we need? Is this what will help? More than anything I would like Dachak to simply stop coming out, and to hear that Wizen (or Jonathan Levy) threw everything away and locked themselves in a room (seven, ten years) and wait to see what comes out of there. And it seems to me that then there will really be something to wait for. And even with bitten nails.
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