A beautiful winter day – cool and sunny & perfect for a ramble across some still unexplored trails. So I packed a few necessities and unleashed Mary, who is always happy to join me on a walk, long or short. Down by the cemetary and out of the village. Rather too many weekenders in the direction of the monastery, so I followed the old road by the highway and the brambled winter stream. Still lots of mud after this week’s rain.

Walking in no particular direction, with no particular purpose, allows my mind to follow suit. I wouldn’t call it meditation, but on the other hand I don’t get wrapped up in my thoughts. It’s just a time of relative mental freedom. It would be nice to think Deep Thoughts like Sebald, whose book ‘The Rings of Saturn’ I stopped to read for a while on the sunny side of a hill. Sebald starts in Suffolk but the way takes him wherever his muse and kalaidopedic ruminations lead him. Nothing of that, nor Krishnamurti’s ‘beneficience’ come to me. But neither do boredom or listlessness. I wonder how my mental state compares to Mary’s – probably rather poorly. If I am half-cognizant of the muddy path and the rustle of the underbrush, she is much more alert, enthusiastic and aware. Her nose is both sharper and closer to the earth, and it leads her hither and thither, so that half an hour of human time must be worth much more in a dog’s experience. Once, while I was sitting, gazing down through the trees she suddenly started to chase fantasms. Then, abruptly, she came up just before my knees and began vigorously to dig a deep hole in the dark soil, at times stopping to thrust her nose down into it. Who knows what was seeking, or imagined she had perceived.

The same half awareness, a consequence of the mind’s multitasking, is a permanent or chronic condition. Consciousness passes in and out between the internal and external worlds. This week one of the most interesting external stimuli was the installation at the Helena Rubinstein museum, ‘Endless solution’, which opened up a little like a riddle, to be solved like one of Yotam’s computer games, but which was also quite a sensual, atmospheric experience, like a strange dream. Endlessly unraveling strings of floating watermelons, candyfloss sheep, a rusting bicycle bejeweled with salt crystals, a couple laboriously furrowing lines in the sand, like strands of DNA, before the inevitable tide. All of this touched my consciousness without really being settled or resolved, and in this, art seems to be true to life, which also flows by without either being fully perceived or understood. So this is a journal of half-perceptions and half-truths. An exhibition, whose creator’s name has been forgotten, a conference half-attended, a photo-opportunity just missed. And always the likelihood that the true wonder of the day lay just up the path not taken.

I have decided to welcome in the new year by adding a blog to this site. The advantage, from my point of view is that it will be possible to jot down thoughts more spontaneously, in journal fashion. Also, I have discovered a way to post material via email. This is very practical for me as my constant companion for the last several years has been my Psion 5MX handheld. Theoretically it can access the web, though I have never found it practical. Email, on the other hand, is easy, using the infrared connection to my mobile phone. So being able to post material
from wherever I am is very convenient. I can leave the rest of the website for more polished entries. This will be a journal.

So, this being a journal, it is necessary to reflect on the last traumatic week that linked the old year with the new. The tabulation of time may be illusory, but since the millenium it has seemed to me that the world is a changed place – one where there is more of a global sense, dissolving borders. This latest event, the tsunami, seems to emphasize this. In the spirit of the twentieth century, a mega-disaster, affecting not only the poor nations ringing the Indian Ocean but thousands of tourists who flood into them; tourists who a few years ago would not have travelled further than the Spanish riviera. In a world where news of the disaster reached the advanced countries quicker than it reached poor African fishermen, whose lives could have been saved had they known of the wave hurtling towards them, the presence of Europeans among the victims perhaps helped raise the consciousness (and the conscience) of the world to the extent of the tragedy.

As a result, this being also the Christmas season, denizens of the first world have opened their pocketbooks in an unprecedented way. Here in Israel, which also counts a few victims, there hasn’t been the same public response. There have been few messages in the media with requests for assistance or phone numbers to call. I thought of this when I visited through Google News the website of the Times of Malta, which prominently highlighted a Red Cross number to call. If a small island like Malta can involve itself in a humanitarian crisis half way around the world, why shouldn’t Israelis? Perhaps because this country does not quite belong to the world community in the same way. Many of the countries involved would not welcome help from here, even if the channels existed to enable it, So an ‘us and them’ mentality prevails. In addition, this country knows better to be on the receiving end of charity than on the side of the giving.