A wedding

Everyone was in Tel Aviv, so a quiet evening spent reading at the screen. At first I watched a video clip posted by Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing. It was about a group of people who decide they want to dance inside the Jefferson Memorial, Washingon, and how this “inappropriate” behaviour is violently and brutally put down by the Park Police (who knock them to the floor, grab them by the throat and handcuff them, etc.). It’s quite a thought-provoking little video that leaves you wishing that instead of four or five people there’d been a couple of hundred harmless spontaneously dancing insurgents.

Interesting though this may have been, its significance paled in comparison to the second video clip I saw later in the evening, which also featured police brutality but this time at a real demonstration, outside the houses of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud, Jerusalem. I found the clip on Mondoweiss and together with it a story by David Shulman on the Sheikh Jarakh Solidarity site.

The demonstration sensitively described by Shulman took place at about 16:00 on Friday, at about the time that the wedding of our daughter Ella was concluding. The odd thing is that, towards the end of the piece Shulman similarly describes a wedding, or rather the sight of a Palestinian bride and groom somehow making their way by car through the madness and mayhem taking place at the demonstration, towards their wedding. And, in the final paragraph he describes his own preparations, that same morning, for the wedding of his son. And he quotes a W H Auden poem which speaks of the fact that suffering always taken place at the exact moment when others are calmly going about their ordinary lives. Should one feel guilt at celebrating while so much suffering is going on?

In the Middle East, the awareness of such contrasts – of the proximity of joy to sadness – is probably closer than in other places. There have been so many occasions in the life of our village where it simply wasn’t possible to celebrate at all. And obviously Jews don’t feel comfortable about celebrating their Independence Day here. If they do so at all, it is usually outside the village.

Anyway, I’m not very good at celebrations. Shulman in the mentioned story, spoke of his sense of deep inner calmness during the time when he and the other demonstrators were being manhandled, hauled and in one case stun-gunned, to break their seated ranks. My own, lesser heroism was that on the morning of the wedding I decided that the day was going to pass calmly and gently and would not (because I so much fear and dislike such occasions) let myself be overcome by it. This resolve came while I was sitting on Ronit’s pateo in Kibbutz Nachshon, while Dorit was having her hair done inside. Reading Swami Sivananda’s “Light, Power and Wisdom” and enjoying the morning sunshine before the anticipated heat of the day, I felt truly peaceful.

The day of the wedding was hot and dry – a hamsin. Coping with such weather depends a lot on one’s frame of mind, because it tends to make people jumpy and irritable. There was a real possibility that someone could suffer health problems, since the wedding was held outside. But the part of the village where it took place – the “corner of silence”, on the lawn and between olive trees, was quite breezy. At one point, the wind even threatened to collapse the marquee – two of the support poles came loose.

Jewish weddings, in fact, always take place under a kind of tent, no doubt with some philosophical significance that is unknown to me. If the wedding is outside, this hupah is made up of a piece of fabric stretched across four poles, which are held up by the wedding guests. Usually the fathers are among those sharing the hupah with the bride and groom, but I remained outside. Later someone asked me about this, thinking that I had been denied entry as a gentile. But this was my own decision. I have nothing against religious ceremonies but know that it is better that I observe than take part in them. So in fact I had a better vantage point this way.

From my vantage point, weddings and all such large, showy and expensive occasions go against my nature and inclination. It’s true that despite all the palaver of organizing it, the occasion itself was special, out of the ordinary, quite different from the large commercial occasions held in halls and wedding gardens. Much more intimate and friendly. I’m sure that everyone will remember it in that way. Perhaps, in my peaceful resistance to such occasions, I’m too caught up in myself. I now suddenly remember Naipaul’s description of Gandhi’s arrival as a young student in Britain. Gandhi was evidently so flustered that he was unable to see or experience anything outside of himself. At the wedding, I did not feel agitated but calm. People remarked upon it because calmness seems as inappropriate during a celebration as dancing in the Jefferson Memorial would to fascist cops. Sattva is a golden chain.

I disappear from more networks

Only social media addicts would probably appreciate my efforts to disengage from so many networks and services. “Normal” people would not be impressed, since they would not have signed up for so many in the first place. In this effort I’m aided by the fact that I keep careful lists of whatever services joined, and can therefore go through the list and eliminate networks one by one. Note: another method is to google your name or username and see where you are listed. Sites like 123people.com are also good places to check.

Sometimes it’s really quite hard to find the “delete account” button. It’s either on a well-hidden unlinked page or requires an email to the company (if you can find their contact information). It’s possible to search for this information on the web, but someone should create a purpose-built site that accumulates all the relevant information on how to disengage from all the networks. It could be an interesting project.

For networks that are a part of Facebook’s or Twitter’s ecosystems, or log into one’s email (like threadsy.com), the easiest thing to do is remove permission for them to log into these services. Some networks, like Identi.ca, have recently introduced “remove account” buttons in their settings.

Despite all the time spent deleting networks, there will still be a lag before search engines catch up with you and delete old posts from their cache. Some content farms or aggregators will probably never delete you from their records until they go bust. You can only pray for their speedy demise.

A simpler(?) way to blog

With all due respect to WordPress’s new dashboard – and it’s a big improvement – I think I have a still simpler way to get my scribblings online. I just played with Fastmail’s file storage / web site option, which I have already been using to store photos. Fastmail can store files of any description, just not blogging software, which requires a database. File upload can be achieved through standard FTP, but also with WebDav. Using the latter is a simple matter in Linux. I compose in LibreOffice, save my file in the WebDav folder, and presto it’s online. I can even re-open and rework it. Afterwards, in order for people to find it, I still need to provide a link to it. If I use a microblogging site like status.net, that can be the place where a discussion around the article would (theoretically) take place.

Of course, blogging is already so easy – one can, for example, use email, and what I’m describing does not actually produce what is usually called a blog. I’ve previously called the concept an anti-blog. But I’m attracted by the simplicity of the idea.

a cable

On the way to the mall I decided I’d finally buy a larger capacity card for my blackberry pearl smartphone, in order to replace my 3 year old i-pod touch for listening to my music collection. Meanwhile I’d lost the micro-USB cable. I knew that, but when they told me a new cable would set me back $15 I decided I should try again to find the wretched thing. It had to be around the house somewhere! So I spent a couple of evenings looking for it. This became an obsession. I looked everywhere, and in some places I looked two or three times. Rummaging ’round, I found about 20 mini-USB camera cables – which I stored carefully all in one box – but didn’t find a single micro-USB phone cable.

This morning, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the computer-end of a USB cable, projecting from under the base of the lamp on the bedside table. I hadn’t remembered it being there, and suddenly had a glimmer of hope that it might be the missing cable. But my mind told me that this was just another manifestation of my crazy obsession with the missing cable. I’d already gone through all the drawers of that table three times and it was surely just yet another mini-USB camera cable. Eventually though, curiosity got the better of me. I got up, then held the black cord stupidly between my fingers. “What is it – that cable?” asked Dorit. “Hmm, hmm”, I replied.