Doctorate on a Black Circle

I offer her friendship through a fake profile and set her to "See First", and follow every post of my new friend first thing in the morning before "Modeh Ani" [morning prayer]. I just wake up from the dream and immediately open Facebook - and it causes me to forget the dream

The importance of the enabling genre: In one small dream there is more content than in a huge doctorate  (Source)

I dreamed they were doing a doctorate about me. It starts when I discover a question about me on Facebook. And all the asker's friends answer nonsense - and I'm dying to answer her but can't, and the discussion fades. And I start digging into her profile and trying to guess how she came across me, and find nothing, but I can't deny that I find her attractive - so maybe she finds me attractive too? And her boyfriend looks so boring, so I wouldn't be surprised if she became interested in another man, a dreamy one.

And not a week goes by and this groupie again asks something about dreams. It's clear she's reading me. I have experience that when someone suddenly reads me, they start to become interested in their own dreams - and even write them down. I've seen this phenomenon with critics too. Except with them the interest stops quickly, while with her it seems to be accelerating, and it looks like I have my first fan. And I offer her friendship through a fake profile and set her to "See First", and follow every post of my new friend first thing in the morning before "Modeh Ani" [morning prayer]. I just wake up from the dream and immediately open Facebook - and it causes me to forget the dream. And even if I still remember it - the dream has already forgotten me, and it now feels so tasteless and bland in my mouth, that I just want to brush my teeth. Just a moment ago this dream was a hundred times more alive than my real life - and suddenly it's even more dead than that. Because now - there's a woman in my life.

And day by day she seems more attractive to me - the woman of my dreams. Since I was born I haven't known a woman who was interested in me so seriously (my wife gave up long ago on this dreamer of a husband): Suddenly she asks something that secular people don't understand, and then she writes something that was clearly inspired by me (I recognize the expressions inside), then she posts a round cake she ate (Freud! Freud!), and then comes the circle on the cream - she posts a nighttime photo of herself in a black dress with a plunging neckline. It's clearly meant for my eyes. Her boyfriend is probably snoring, and at night she imagines how the circle dreams. Only she doesn't imagine that he's dreaming about her.

And what's most flattering is that the beauty is studying Hebrew literature. There's no chance she's reading me and I'm not intriguing her, right? I mean - could it be that this turns her on? After all, I'm a mysterious and dark man, like women with black shoes like hers love, right? (What photos she posts, I swear - even if she doesn't reveal anything: at least I have the shoes left). And if I had such a boring and sleep-inducing boyfriend, a Facebook leftist (I follow him on "See First" too, so he usually starts my day on the wrong foot) - I would escape to the world of dreams too. What does she see in him? (It should be noted that this is not to her benefit). Surely their passion died long ago, and nothing happens in bed before sleep, so only the after remains. And suddenly I realize that maybe she's dreaming about me - about me! - at night. The world has turned upside down - the black universe is collapsing into itself. And who knows if our dreams about each other - mine and hers - don't intersect every night in the dream world. This is the closest thing to love I've had in years.

But then one day (or night?) a virtual black cat crosses between us. Did she fight with me? Did we break up? I don't know what happened in the darkness of that night - but something happened. Did I do something? Did I write something bad, unsuccessful? Did she have a bad dream? And I try to imagine from everything I've written, maybe there was something too much? Something that shocked her so much? And I start to eat my heart out over all the times I didn't hold back in how I wrote about women (she's surely a feminist). What raised her anger? Yes, divorce - it's sharp and sudden, and she doesn't write about me at all anymore, at all, at all, just after a period when we were at the peak of our relationship and she wrote about me almost every day and posted dreams on Facebook, and it's clear that non-dreamy things are occupying her (the vacation with the boring boyfriend). And I don't understand this crazy woman, what does she want from me? What did I do to her? She reminds me of my wife. When we got married I couldn't believe my luck that out of all my yeshiva class I was marrying the most bountiful woman in the world. And today I would trade both her breasts for one kind word.

And then one morning, when I woke up after troubled dreams, it hit me like a bolt from the blue: my virtual ex, my only love in all these years, the princess of my sweet dreams, posts one picture that explains everything, everything, everything - what a fool I was - it was all one big lie. I expected a marriage proposal on the overseas vacation, I expected falling in love with another writer, a competitor, or even a crazy return to religion (shall we meet?), or even adopting a black cat - I expected everything, I knew that sooner or later the morning of status change would come - and destroy my world. But I didn't expect this. And all her friends congratulate her, as if she got married. Because from today a new name is added to her name - Dr. - and in the picture you can see a new kind of book (not mine): "Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Hebrew Literature: Reading in Black Circle - Towards Lost Time".

And I can't restrain myself, I put on the secular disguise, and run to the university library, to look for the work about me. And I open the booklet, now reading it instead of the opposite (there's a certain thrill in this, I admit), and my eyes darken. Because my eyes jump between the lines highlighted in black, and the situation is worse than my worst dreams (I quote from memory - the essence of the horror): An inverse version in time of Proust. Tries to take Proust's structure in the direction of the past - and invert the structure symmetrically towards the future. Proust of the future: Towards lost time - only the feeling that something is open, that it is a fertile future direction, only it gives taste and touches outside of time, because it takes us out of the present, but it is also not in the future itself (which has not yet arrived), but gives the freedom and excitement in our souls. Therefore science fiction fails, and in contrast fictional soul - the dream - is a suitable genre for the future. And even Proust himself remembers and appreciates precisely the moments when he still had a dream for the future (there is also a missed paragraph in "Time Regained" - in which Proust understands the potential of the dream, but abandons it without a satisfactory explanation).

This idiot, I didn't read Proust at all! How could I have copied him to the future? How do you say shtreimel [Hasidic fur hat] in French? To the same extent one could claim that he copied the circle to the past! How can someone read me, really read me, and think such things? She didn't understand anything. All this time. How could she love me when she didn't know who I am at all? She loved someone else entirely, an imaginary circle inside her head. What a black Proust. And this is a thousand times more disappointing than when she cheated on me with her boyfriend.

And now - my image has also been tarnished (I feel like an ink stain leaking outside the lines). Forever, if there is ever future research that will deal with me, even in a hundred years, it will quote this pioneer with the dresses billowing in the wind (suddenly I remember that her boyfriend has a little black French mustache!). They will always think of me in a crooked way, not circular at all, and all because they forced someone who read Proust to read Black Circle. I will forever be remembered as a kind of ultra-Orthodox version of someone who isn't even my secular version - I have neither this world nor the next world. And I understand that there is only one chance to correct the distortion: I can enroll in university, and do a doctorate on myself. After all, no one knows who I am.

And I study more and more literature there, and am increasingly surprised by my utter failure. Because I always thought that all the secular writers are surely much more original, colorful and free than me, and suddenly I think about each one: What, is this really not more interesting - the dreams? Is this really not more innovative? And even - is this not more important? After all, the tradition of Hebrew literature is always exalted in the throats of these, but Jewish-futuristic writing doesn't interest them at all, but rather another human story that already belongs to the past, that we've already read, in a genre we've already exhausted. Like a ritual they seek what was, and the conventions of "the language" (when there's nothing to say - there's "the language"), just like ultra-Orthodox Haredim - new is forbidden by the Torah. They simply worship the past - and I am a heretic. And after a quarter of the course I'm fed up with academia, and I decide to submit the doctorate directly to the head of the department - let him rack his brains. What, can't I bind some booklet that says submission of research work for the purpose of obtaining a doctorate in philosophy for a penny? After all, I've written mountains of hanging dreams! - in one day I write a doctorate.

And I write my doctorate on the world, which is (in my opinion) much more interesting than the world's doctorate on me. And the plan is to take the doctorate about me from the library and make it disappear in a fire, and bind my doctorate inside it - and return:

Black Circle: Between Dream and Reality - Doctoral Thesis on All World Literature

Introduction and Acknowledgments

What a waste of paper! You can't see the forest for the trees, and are busy with self-censorship in wooden writing rules that don't allow anything (have you ever thought of writing a doctorate that is a dream?). So come, head of department, and I'll put your circle head in order (like this in general. Because that's what a doctorate is for: not for the small but for the big). In literature there are shades and shades of shades, but if you want to examine processes in general you need to examine the last two greats that there are no greats between them and after them: Dostoevsky and Kafka. So since in the half course I took I read a quarter of a book by one and an eighth of a book by the other - let me tell you what literature is.

Proof of Original Research

Dostoevsky's literary tendency to gamble and gamble (and constantly increase the bet) until his books collapse, stems from his own borderline gambling personality - it is he who is the hysterical characters, and therefore the emotional hysteria (Bakhtin - the carnival) is the central characteristic of the melodramatic Dostoevskian man (which he thought was the Russian man). Since the hysteria constantly rises gradually, a process of normalization of it is created - it suddenly seems normal to the reader that the psycho is going crazy, because that's how Russians are (meaning it created in the West a Russian image of savages).

The gradual normalized estrangement continued in the 20th century with the estrangement of the external environment (Kafka, your Agnon), which created a mythical quality, because myth is a normal person within a strange medium, and not a strange person within a normal medium, as the mystical Dostoevsky thought, with his secular and Orthodox saints (because of the excess humanism he suffered from). In a dream you are you, it's the external environment that is not it. Even in metamorphosis you are you, it's just your body. While with Dostoevsky the metamorphosis is internal (The Double for example), unlike Gogol where the change is external, and therefore stronger.

What Tolstoy and Dostoevsky did is an estrangement of the soul (and thus Lolita is a logical continuation), and therefore the reader is created an illusion of human depth, because after all the soul is so complicated with them, like the external world becomes more and more complicated with Kafka (and with him too the estrangement rises gradually to create a normalization process), and at the very least the illusion is created that the Russian soul is so complicated (if Dostoevsky had created in a Western European language it wouldn't have passed, because we know Europeans - they are sane like us).

It's a bit like how American Jewish writers exploited the foreignness of the Jewish soul to create protagonists who wouldn't have passed as normal people like us, Americans. Because Jews are neurotic, obsessive (about sex), and Freudian in their psyche (creating here a possibility of adapting the psyche to the theory). Therefore in German, Kafka cannot create a psychotic person (although as a person he was more psychotic than Dostoevsky), but rather a psychotic world, because German would reject the psychosis (or classify it as Jewish, meaning not universal). Even with Agnon, the protagonist is normal, it's the dog that's mad (meaning there's a need for an externalization mechanism of the psychosis).

This repression of psychosis into the world is much more psychologically interesting - because it's more repressed, and therefore more convincing. After all, a psychotic doesn't think he's psychotic, but that the world is psychotic. The world has gone mad, not him. This is also exactly the difference between the New Testament and the Old Testament. The heroes of the Bible are normal people, and suddenly an abnormal miracle happens in reality, described as if it's normal, like in Kafka (and therefore it's powerful). In contrast, in Christianity, Jesus and the saints are special and psychotic people, not normal, in a normal world (Jesus on the cross and the cross continues as usual). Even the miracles are normalized (and therefore much less powerful). The drama in Christianity is internal, not external, and therefore the gospel addresses the soul. The gospel of Judaism addresses the world and its drama is in reality (and therefore there are also commandments, a people, historical goals, etc.).

The extreme Dostoevskian emotion, in a process of escalation, is familiar to us today from the American world: everything is amazing, crazy, horrifying (even if it's related to breakfast). In other words, an extreme emotional relationship between man and the world quickly turns into kitsch. On the other hand, the Kafkaesque person, where the world goes mad but the person doesn't get excited, thus normalizing the abnormal world, meaning the emotional relationship is inverse - he is the real person (for example, the person of the Holocaust and technology: everything around him collapses and reality changes completely but he continues in his normality - "life goes on"). And this describes the human condition in a much more realistic way than "realistic" prose: the change in the world accelerates but there is no change in man (and a mismatch is created).

Therefore Kafka touches the soul deeper than Dostoevsky - because he has no soul. Just as the Bible touches the soul deeper than the New Testament - because it has no soul. And then the reader experiences within himself the drama against the world in the story. While with Dostoevsky, the characters experience the drama for us, we constantly encounter another soul, which is not our soul, and experience the drama secondhand, and are forced to admire the soul. Therefore, the effect of the mismatch between the soul and the world is stronger in Kafka. But what is the solution to this mismatch? This is Kafka's lacuna, which leads to his pessimism, in which the mismatch grows until the destruction of man (the victory of the Holocaust).

Only literature where reality goes crazy, dreamlike, but man also responds to it in a dreamlike way, will be able to discuss a constructive solution. Although such literature will necessarily be less emotionally powerful than the previous two, because there will be no mismatch in it. On the other hand, it will be more intellectually interesting and open - and fertile. With Kafka, the structure is always tragedy, meaning the end is known in advance, and with Dostoevsky the structure is beneath the surface comic (which is why his endings are almost always weak). These are very complex structures (whose interest is in their increasing complexity - not in their resolution), but closed.

But for those interested in the future, closed literature is less interesting. Only literature that creates future learning directions, positive, only it is fertile. Because the creative reader feels that it gives him more materials to work with, to continue them. The literature of the soul is paralyzing, it is a steamroller, and people indeed admire the work of the steamroller and worship it (like any slave) but they are not free and do not liberate themselves. Their enjoyment is the enjoyment of the passive, not the creator. Therefore, it is literature that conceals its own joy of creation (the myth of the suffering artist). The enjoyment of the writer-reader is a sadomasochistic relationship - the creative fun simply touches the human soul less deeply, precisely because it is less pathological - it is less pleasurable.

Therefore, we need to create literature with different expectations - that it will give ideas. Postmodern literature failed in this, because play is not a creative enough thing, because it doesn't contain enough innovation for adults. Infinite possibilities do not mean infinite innovations, because they do not mean infinite possibilities of innovations, because innovation is learning-based in our brain. The innovation needs to be in the method, and infinite innovations in the same method are not innovation - only a new method is innovation. In other words, the problem with these playful creators is that they are actually less creative and with fewer truly new ideas, meaning methodically new (because the game is limited: it's combinations, meaning possibilities). Therefore, we need to find a creative possibility that is not playful.

Because since we are learning-based and not mechanisms, any writer who has a mechanism behind him is not really interesting, after we've learned the mechanism. A great writer is one whose mechanism is difficult to learn, or a learning mechanism itself, meaning a great writer is a new method of writing. The central mistake of writers is turning a method into a mechanism - meaning what they learned from a writer's method is the mechanism of how to write like him, and not the method of how to invent new mechanisms. In other words, literature is divided into second-order writers, who are the few greats - the methods - and first-order writers, who are the many - the mechanisms (even combining two mechanisms is quite a primitive method, and here 99% of writers stop). Therefore, the sentence that ends the previous paragraph should be replaced with finding a creative method that is not playful (and God forbid not a creative mechanism that is not playful). Such literature will touch the deep (and pleasurable!) creative impulses of man, as opposed to his deep neuroses.

This literature will need to demonstrate an exceptional creative apparatus in its capabilities. This mechanism will need to bridge the tension that has become a zero-sum game in postmodern literature (literally): on the one hand fertile and open - and on the other hand interesting and deep (meaning not mechanistic). A natural direction for such an apparatus is the use of the most fertile creative apparatus existing in man - the dream. Dreams are on the one hand the most creative area in every person's life, and on the other hand the deepest (we never get bored in our dreams), and on the third hand traditionally deals in our culture with connecting the past to the future. Therefore, a new writing method that will make use of dream mechanisms - meaning a dream method - can be the solution to the problem.

This method needs to be careful not to turn into a dream production mechanism. First, it needs to filter out of the dream its arbitrary parts (meaning the playful ones), because there's no doubt that the dream has too many possibilities, and to distill from the dream apparatus its methodical parts, meaning those based on learning. For example, conventions like: seeing the future, struggling within an imaginary change in the world, estrangement, symbolism, reflecting mythical archetypes, touching worlds beyond, and more. Each of these mechanisms is veteran in literature, but only through the dream framework do they unite into a new essence: the dream method allows dealing with the future from within action, thought and soul in the present, meaning from within literature.

The dream is the fictional laboratory (which is far superior to science fiction, meaning futuristic realism) that is capable of developing narrative experiments that examine the future and the open ideational possibility space before us freely. Therefore, the dream genre is the natural literary space for developing future ideas, future perception and most importantly - future consciousness. The dream is the narrative way of consciousness to think about the future (and we do not exclude from this fantasy and daydreaming, or even the ideological or prophetic or mystical dream. Or even the technological dream). Therefore - dream literature is the literature of the future.

Now, if we close the circle and return to Dostoevsky and Kafka, we will understand that dream literature is the Copernican revolution of literature. Because if we ask ourselves whether it makes more estrangement to man or perhaps to the world - we will not get an answer, and so too if it exposes more the world or rather the soul, and where its focus is. In fact, in a dream the soul and the world unite so that there is no more division between the external world and the soul (and this is in contrast to consciousness literature, where the external world is still realistic and only the focus changes - and therefore sometimes loses connection with external reality). In a dream there is no division between external and internal, because even the external world in a dream deals with the internal, and the internal world is entirely expressed in the external (there is no stream of consciousness in a dream). In a dream no one is normal, neither the world nor man, and therefore no gap is created between them and there is no breaking (not even an epistemological break).

In other words, the dream is a complete reversal of realistic literature, where both the soul is normal and logical and so is the world. With Kafka, the reversal is expressed in the abnormal and illogical world, and with Dostoevsky the reversal is expressed in the abnormal and illogical soul, while in a dream the reversal is double - both in the soul and in the world - and therefore a new alignment between the world and the soul can be created in it. Therefore, the dream is suitable for a period when the world is changing rapidly - because man can also change rapidly in it. In fact, the dream is this rapid change. It allows imagining a person who behaves differently from us, and thinks and feels differently from our contemporary, meaning the person of the future - but not a person foreign to us, but ourselves.

Summary for those who didn't read anything

The dream allows speaking freely about the possible, in contrast to realism which is trapped in pretending to the necessary and the probable. So in fact the dream is realistic - only its reality is alternative, because an alternative world would create an alternative person (the mismatch is not realistic! And suits only a transitional crisis situation, hence the pessimism and break of modern literature). For this freedom, the dream pays by not working on the reader through the identification mechanism, which is ultimately a preserving psychological mechanism, but through the interest mechanism, which is a re-learning mechanism.

Contrary to what we feel, the identification mechanism in literature is not natural and is a cultural product, which took a long time to develop into the central mechanism of reading. Therefore, we need to develop today a different reading, which does not ask what I would feel in his place, but what I learn from this, what new possibilities. Just like the reading of Torah study, which is not built on identification with the heroes. Learning is a distant cousin of suspense, which asks what will happen, except that it asks what can happen. What is possible to happen in the future. For such a mechanism to work, the reader needs to be interested in advance in the future, and not just in himself (in the identifying soul), and not just in the world in the book (the suspense), but in the development of the real future world outside the book - which the book talks about. Just as a cultural convention developed that the most truthful way to talk about the real world is through fiction, so in the future there could be a convention that the way to talk about the future is through dreams.

Bibliography:
All literature in its entirety. Including appendices.


And then of course the most unexpected thing happens in reality - or perhaps the most expected. My dream comes true. Because here I am going up with my doctorate to the faculty floor at the institute - my heart is pounding in the corridor and I'm afraid that soon all the respectable literature people in their rooms will hear it, who knows what they're doing inside - without knowing what awaits me right there at the end of the hallway, and all this time waited for me at the end of my academic journey. Because who do I meet there? Who, who? Dr. Black Circle.

And the universe collapses into itself.