I hope you don't give up.

I have been reluctant to write. Searching for thoughts worth sharing; those I feel comfortable revealing.

Cold rain is falling outside. This morning, thunder woke me from the couch. A friend from the fireline is staying with me. I took the sofa, and gave him my bed.

It would be a good day to sleep in, with gray skies and chilling rain, but now I am one floor below the ground, at the library. Preparing for class, but not really. Maybe just escaping into silence by myself, before I excitedly and reluctantly enter the classroom.

International Development people are strange folk. I grow tired of their postmodern drudgery. Empty words without definition. "But we want to change the world," they say. "To benefit humankind; to bring light to those in darkness."

But in the quiet of my mind I ask, "where does the dark come from? And from where do you gain your concept of light?"

Goodness must have a source, and I know that it is not 'I'. With my great human potential for evil, change for my sake alone is worth nothing to me. The world is not subjective; "rightness" is not "rightness" when and where I say it is. There is something greater, and I will find it.

I am weary.

Tel Aviv, so far.

Tel Aviv has quite an impressive street art scene. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to stir the artistic heart of whatever side one might align themselves with. Other than graffiti murals, I hope to capture pieces of where I now live.

Bear with me and I will make a greater effort to take my camera out. Enjoy.

Outside of the apartment. Ha'Kovshim.


Not mine. But oh, how I wish it was.


The bottom half of a "graffiti shop" door.

No. 8.

I am trying to emulate the study habits of the greats. Who might they be? Monks and nuns, perhaps? Although, where their practice may often be in silence, mine is taking a slightly divergent note.

I have begun to familiarize myself with the central library on campus. Its appearance is quite bland. The carpet is old, thin in spots from frequent treading. The colors, a bit dreary. Perhaps thousands of volumes are on the shelves. I love to be surrounded by literature, but when confronted with hit or miss class reading, sometimes I need a shove. One more push in the direction of inspiration. One more driving nail to secure ideas to the wall; to catch falling thoughts.

As I sit, I imagine a shadow of myself dancing around the room, running for ideas and wandering notions. Papers waft slowly from above. Yellow sheets. Blue sheets. White sheets of paper. Lined and graphed. Dropping from beyond the ceiling, they cascade towards the ground. And there I am, looking like a frantic trader. With ruffled papers squeezed between my elbow and my left side, I stride about the room. My right arm extended, I snatch them from the air and force them to the pile. These papers--ideas, theories, words, names--float through my conscious realm, and for a moment my shadow holds them for a more permanent memory. Others, they pass on. Ideas for later. Papers dropping through the floor like ghosts, on to the next boy reading alone.

Somehow, without theme and melody--alone with the silence of fluttering papers--this imagery creates chaos in my mind. But with music, there is a soundtrack to the paper rain. Now, instead of running, I walk. Instead of tearing through literature, I simply lean into the back of a chair. I recline on my elbow and take what I can.

I have purchased some new music. New albums for new inspiration. I have convinced myself I need this. Based on a well thought recommendation, I have bought Mahler's Symphony No. 8, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Having listened to the 1st Symphony, I have been told I am ready for the 8th. My theory has not yet been tested in the library, but at home I am finding success. First performed in Munich in the early 20th century, with a chorus of 850 and an orchestra of 171 you can imagine the sheer might! Suddenly, my pathetically bland living room is no matter. The piece is reaching its conclusion. The final stanza, "Alles Vergangliche". The choir sends chills from my shoulders to my legs. The organ thunders to life. I lean my head back and close my eyes. Please, do not end.

I think this will do.

Back to school.

I have found a cafe. Slowly, I am becoming a regular.

A large window is open behind me. Momentary breeze cools the sweat of my back. Humidity seeps through the cracks. The chef, in white, walks in. Halfway through a smoke break. Under low light, a cigarette glows between his finger tips. Squeezed between his knuckles. Funk falls in deep beats from the speakers on the ceiling. Herbie Hancock. A palm tree stands in the sidewalk. Fronds move on occasion. If I ignore all the asphalt and steel, I am almost not in Tel Aviv. I am almost in the Middle East. But not quite.

The third week of class will soon begin. I approach it with excitement and trepidation. I am a graduate student. Time marches on.

The year will be intense. After all, an MA in a single year should be quite a feat. Thankfully, my peers and colleagues are proving to be quite encouraging. We hail from all parts of the globe. Thirty-eight of us altogether. Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, America, Canada, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Turkey, Israel, Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, and Japan. With equally diverse backgrounds, discussion provides a strong backing to material. For this first semester, the first of three, we will all take the same classes. The other two semesters will allow for some variation. Here is the current schedule:

Monday:
-Cross-Cultural Perspectives of Conflict Resolution and Mediation
-Conflict and International Law
-Principles and Processes of Negotiation in Conflict Resolution

Tuesday:
-Political Approaches to Internation Conflicts and their Resolution
-Research Methods (Yuck)

Wednesday:
-Israeli Politics and Society
-History of the Middle East (Thus far, a personal favorite)

Thursday:
-Alternative Dispute Resolution
-Socio-Psychological Theories of Conflict Resolution

This is the inaugural year of the International Master's program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation. We are all a bit frazzled; administrators, professors, and students. Things are in slight disarray, but to a degree this is to be expected. Our professors come from all over the country. From Haifa, from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem. We have 9 classes in 4 days, Monday through Thursday. There are school trips to be planned. Internships to be found. Language classes to find. Speakers to schedule. Special events to attend. And all within a year.

How will we accomplish all of this? Somehow, that's how.

Will I die in the process? Maybe.

Will I be reborn, a stronger individual? I would like to think so. Actually, I believe so.

Literary triage.

This blog could have easily been titled 'Dostoevsky drops my jaw', 'Nietzsche makes me kneel', 'Kazantzakis kicks my can', or maybe even 'Derrida makes me cry confusing tears'. But moving on instinct and passion, Kerouac steals the day. Ahem, the title.

Is it obsessive to say literature could be my girlfriend? Oh, its just a joke. Don't worry all you want to be Freudian psychoanalysts, literature is not my girlfriend. And 'this' sentence certainly doesn't flow like the song. For most of you though, my new devoted readers, the names of these authors will instantly ring a bell in your mind. Even the most self-admittedly clueless should at least recognize, or experience a hinting subconscious notion, of at least one name. If not, shame on you! Visit a library, they are free. These names stand as pillars in literary history.

On a personal level, the emotional effects of where and when I read is equally powerful. Reading The Birth of Tragedy while questioning the nature of injustice did drop me to my knees. Reading To Build A Fire, even in the oppressive heat of Bangladesh, made me shiver.

Literature, from the Latin word for "acquaintance with letters", incites deep, personal meaning. The terms 'book' or 'novel' may hold some credibility on their own, but to me nothing compares to the mental picture of Melville penning the first pages of Moby Dick. Or of Franklin racing into the night on a journey to complete his Autobiography; a momentary surge of literary inspiration; just one more sentence.

Even now, names crowd my brain. 'Swift makes me slaphappy'. 'Solzhenitsyn makes me shiver (and want to grow an amazing beard)'. I imagine all of the above arguing with me for rights to the title. Thomas Paine tells me the answer should be clear. Vonnegut is sarcastic, as always. I like him, but for now I don't care what he thinks. And poor Melville, he just sulks away when I shrug and tell him, no. He has obviously not yet caught on to my feigned apathy. For all he knows Moby Dick was a tragic literary attempt.

For me, these names are more than just a bell. They are a gong, reverberating beneath the surface of my skin.

You can imagine my concern in deciding which books to bring with me to Israel. A fraction of my personal library was stacked at my feet and about the basement. Standing there I felt like an old hen of a nurse, or a rooster in my case, caught at the scene of disaster. I clucked about, forced to triage the deserving victims. Who will I leave behind?

I tried to pick a few that would aid me as a graduate student. White Man's Burden - William Easterly and Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse - Sylvain Cypel. But to pass my reasoning as only academic, offsets what I am trying to prove: that literature, a book if you will, is enjoyable. It must be, if you are to be profoundly affected. I do not regard reading as an academic to be a dysfunction, but if passion for reading is first instilled--education will naturally follow.

So what did I bring? Without further ado:

The Shia Revival - Vali Nasr
White Man's Burden - William Easterly
Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse - Sylvain Cypel
The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx - Ernest Mendel
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
To Know as We Are Known - Parker J. Palmer
The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret - Jacques Derrida
Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question - Jacques Derrida
A Kierkegaard Anthology - edited by Robert Brethall

What are you reading?

Anecdotes from ink.

We learn the most in retrospect, so I believe. Time is always moving. To us, it is linear. Seconds turn to minutes turn to hours. As I recline in a Tel Aviv cafe, my life ticks onward. A pendulum clicks in my mind, like the pendulum of my father's clock on the living room wall. Listen to its swing: *click click click click*.

Listen to sounds of movement--apparent to ears, too silent to find without focus. I think I hear my stubble growing, pressing through the skin. Look up. Throaty voices chatter in Hebrew. A coffee cup clinks on a platter. I hear but do I understand? I am in a tunnel, traveling, looking for focus and questioning this place. I write with ambiguity, trying to transfer the search from my mind to these black keys at fingertips.

I am in Israel.

[Monday, October 12th ---------- 1:07 AM
Tel Aviv, this is my new home. I am almost moved in,
but not quite. Two bags remain on the floor,
unzipped yet half unpacked.
I wait for nothing.
Reading what has been recommended for class,
this idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy,
is just one among many related to
positive outcomes in mediation
and conflict resolution.
Yet perhaps this is one of my favorites
for the initial capitulation;
the entry into the fray.
Attitude is everything. For many of us, we choose to make
our situation what it is. Choice.
These ideas, I have made my own
over the past year, most likely longer,
and to see them applied in a qualitative
research-based setting is encouraging.
They are basic, of course, but they still keep at heart
a central theme of humanity:
you may choose to see what is in front of you
as a blessing or a curse;
as fate or as divine influence.
Whatever the world around you supposes
is not completely cast off from legitimacy,
but for the sake of emotional fortitude
of a personal nature,
may you choose your attitude.
There is yet a common thread that runs through humanity.
I am convinced of it, and it will take
a great reckoning
for me to give up my position.
Importantly, this is not an idea that lumps
all of humanity together with blind
consideration for intrinsic and unique value,
rather this simply means that somehow
we all have the power to shut our eyes
or to open them.
More is to come if we choose to look.
I will not give up my search.
This is only the beginning.
Everyday is a beginning.
May you grab it.]

Incapable of stepping outside self, of peering through the eyes of another, I am left with no other perception but my own. Staring through the filter of personal experience I find that the past is crushing. Yet revealing. Closed as a book, yet gaping open. The past few years have been tumultuous. In some ways I feel that the very foundation of my understanding rocked to the ground. A divorce. An exploration of faith in the Far East and beyond. The completion of university, and now the beginning of a master's program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv Unversity. The cornerstone of my existence has been questioned repeatedly and if you were to ask me, just a few months ago, where I stood in this quest for belief, I would have told you that agnosticism is all I accept. I would have told you to "ask me tomorrow" (SK). But oh, how a choice to actively search rather than apathetically sit in the dust has brought me here. I might still tell you, ask me tomorrow. I might tell you to patiently wait. I am in a process of rebuilding. Structuring answers out of ambiguity. Facing the present. But first, look to the past.

[Friday October 2nd, 2009 ---------- 12:56AM
The ambiguity of development work is
sometimes crushing to me.
How do I find relevance in my attempt to relate
within Buddhist culture,
or Hindu culture,
or Muslim culture?
Those who choose to follow this career path,
this pursuit of vocation or calling,
must be comfortable with ambiguity;
comfortable with allowing and often inspiring others
to find their own answers.
This is sustainability.
For those in pursuit of Christ,
or those who believe stalwartly
in the rightness of their burning cause,
this seemingly subjective reality could create
a major crisis of faith.
But speaking for myself,
maybe I have missed
'the' fundamental truth of development.
If God is the omnipotent being
that He is described to be,
and if we are to believe our freedom of choice
is a reality,
then presenting myself as an open catalyst
for the sake of another man
existing just one more day
might be the very best that I can do.
If this is so, then perhaps
the example of Christ lives in me to an extent
more than I would readily believe.
Truth proves freedom,
but does not freedom also prove truth?
Maybe the very words,
"you choose"
are exactly what someone needs to hear
in order to send their heart
into a heavy beat,
that lifts their eyes to mine,
which in a lasting glint says to them,
"yes, freedom exists in something greater than me."]

I am in pursuit of adventure. In an indirect 'thank you' to Luke Helm, I have discovered the title of this blog.

In the 11th chapter of On the Road, Kerouac writes: "When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to young guys in their middle twenties." In response:

[Thursday, August 27th ---------- 1:03PM
The evils days are upon me.
All happiness seems a facade;
spending money, a distraction for the moment.
There is turmoil beneath the surface.
And how much of this is a fault of my own?
How flippant the human heart is.
One instant I am rejoicing in my flight through life;
I follow my own leads,
never taking the roads below
but gliding through the sky on a path of my own.
It is unmarked and sometimes even unknown
to me for days and weeks,
or perhaps just an hour.
No matter,
my head is in the clouds and that is a good place to be,
right?
I didn't know it before,
but Kerouac has cast a shadow
of what I hope my life is becoming;
in some ways, fully cognizant of love in the flesh;
love for taste, and sound, and sight.
The sight of long legs and dark eyes
and mountaintops and lunatics
and a few other mid-twenty somethings
who intersect my life and I theirs.
We meet in random places.
A home welding shop in Missoula,
a boulder-strewn mountain slope in Idaho,
a guesthouse in Kathmandu,
a language school in Dhaka,
a wedding table in Warrenville.
The faces of my generation,
in pursuit of fulfillment.]

From a scribbled entry on the page, I search for definition. What brought me from Joliet, to Cambodia, to Nepal, has now brought me to Israel.

Sitting here in this cafe, I like to imagine Jack Kerouac, himself, across from me. Leaning forward onto the table, pressing his elbows into the wood, and curling his fingers into fists as he emphatically stares into my eyes with wide open wonder, and I into his. As he lurches forward to swap a tale with me, the night moves on in Tel Aviv.

He leans back to catch a breath. I do the same.

"How did I arrive here, in Israel of all places?" I ask him. And as time clicks onward the two of us bask in its glow. The past melts into now.

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies." -- On the Road