Samuel 5: In Wirting

Abject

 

No one you

warns

about the shame--

 

the body turned swamp,

turned quicksand --

how the hollows gape

 

every time you walk, every time

you climb. Sliding, sliding,

drown—

 

after breaking, the body

will not seal. Bleed

for a month, three months

 

eternity. The terror

of sitting. Of shitting.

Put ice. Witch

 

hazel. Cry your eyes closed.   

No one warns you

 

how the jointed boat 

pelvis will creak, rock.

leak. How bodies

 

once mended, a ridge

of stitching remains,

 

like a seamed sock

rubbing your shoe.

 

How you can hate

your own stench

 

wash and wash,

and never feel clean.

 

Lord of hosts

Lord of knowings

teach me the multiplicity

 

of this body that opens

and shuts without volition, quivering

like a vibrating string.

 

Lord of endings

beginnings

and thresholds

 

where I lie toppled

eyes fixed upward

curled hands conches

 

feet transforming

back to the tail

that will buy me back my voice. 

Samuel: Chapter 5

 

Watch for the portal

Enflamed limen

between here and there

you and me

For full chapter, click here

As the Israelites scream in despair, the Philistines triumphantly carry off the Ark of Covenant--Israel's great hope--to the Temple of Dagon. We are returned to another nadir in Israel's history, when Samson, who had "begun to redeem Israel from the Philistines," was publicly debased in Dagon's temple. Yet the intertextual link contains a hint of hope: the very triumph of the Philistines may be their downfall, bringing their temple down upon them. 

If in the previous chapter, Israel was punished when they celebrated their prowess and control over the Ark, now the Philistines' turn has come.  As in the previous chapter, the emphasis is on the word "take" lakakh, highlighting the physical manipulation of what should be sacred, beyond human ken; the human propensity to grab. The Philistines "take" the Ark from Even HaEzer, they "take" it to the Temple of Dagon, and they "take" Dagon when he topples at the foot of the Ark. 

In response, God severs Dagon's "hands". There will be no handling. The public debasment of Dagon is followed by a private debasment of the Philistened. God's "hand" spreads throughout the Philistine city in a plague (echoing the Exodus,when the "hand of God"  kills the livestock ). The Israelites had hoped for a Lord of (military) Hosts Who fights in the open, "trumpeting" the arrival the Ark to their camp, as though it were a weapon.  When the Ark finally acts against the Philistenes, it is specifically through the hidden, the invisible. The Philistines are struck with hemeroids, their most private bodily functions made public in a general outcry (homeh) that echoes Israel's despairing cry in the previous chapter. The Ark is avenged through shame, the debasement of the Philistines both elided and inscribed in the text by the difference between the written and read form of the word for "hemeroid"--read as t'horim (hemeroid), written as afli (sahdowed, dark), as though the word is too shameful to be written, but highlighted by its very absence. The "dishonor" (I-kavod) experienced by Israel in the previous chapter is countered here by the " very heavy  (kaved) hand of God".   

As in the case Samson, who carries the gates of Gaza on his back, the interaction with the Philistines, Israel's closest neighbors, revolves around liminal spaces. Dagon's severed hands and face are found on the threshold of his temple; the priests of Ashdod avoid the temple doorway; similarly, in the previous chapter, Eli dies at the entrance to the Mishkan, his neck broken when he strikes the doorpost. God here attacks the Philistines through the most hidden limen of all, the portal through which the body excretes what does not belong, a passageway between self and not-self.   The battle between Israel and the Philitenes takes place in this charged space between self and other, feeling for boundaries.

Samuel 4: In Writing

Within the darkness

that presses its nose

against the window

a baby screams

and screams

her father humming

desperate sursuration

Not mine. Not now 

Not today. 

Lights out. Bedtime

On distant lit pathways

a stroller appears. Disappears. 

I’m scared to go to the army,” my son says.

What if I don’t like the food?

And also--I might get killed. 

Crouch in a ditch. Pray. 

So many promises I want to make.

But nothing to say. 

I tell him of the Davidka,

the canon that couldn’t aim

but saved the city with its roar

The siren shriek

haunts the night

but my children have learned

to barely flich. 

 

Today my son has an earthquake drill;

last night, a missile.

Saferoroms sprout like mushrooms

before the rains. 

Two helicopters circle 

locuslike overhead.

encircled in the angry

howl of aircraft. 

I will have mercy

on whom I have mercy

And grace 

on whom I have grace.

Yet how we long to lock

salvation in a box

to shoot at will

Samuel: Chapter 4

 

When words fail...

The center

does not hold.

What will the future birth? 

For full chapter, click here,

"And Samuel's word went forth throughout Israel"-- a triumphant announcement of Samuel's ascension. Yet this opening verse also contains a hint of threat. For if Samuel's "word" is trustworthy, then the destruction he prophesied must and will come.

And come it does: the decimation of Israel's army, the capture of the Ark of Covenant, the death of Hofni and Pinhas, the heartbroken death of Eli. Only in his death do we learn the extent of his greatness--he is one of the few pivotal judges, who like Otniel, Debora and Gideon led Israel for a definitive 40 years. Yet there is no hope for his family's future, as even birth turns deadly: Pinchas' wife dies in childbirth, naming her child I-Kavod, No-Honor--a fulfillment of God's initial prophecy "For I honor (kavod)  those who honor Me, but those who spurn Me shall be dishonored."   

Between Samuel's definitive "word" (davar) and the "word" (davar) brought by the soldier of Israel's defeat is a collection of wordless cries: the army "trumpets" (tru'ah) in triumph as the Ark is brought to the encampment; the city screams (tza'aka) and shrieks (zaaka) as the terrible news of defeat spreads. Language becomes a chaotic cacophony (hamon; homeh).

The breakdown of speech into primal screams creates a need for interpretation:  “Why is there such a roar in the camp of the Hebrews?” the Philistines ask; What is the meaning of the uproar?" asks Eli.  Functionally, these sounds echo Samuel's prophecy: a warning coming to fruition. There are no true surprises--everything has its "herald", if we but learn to listen.

Intertextually, these wordless cries return us to the moment Moses descends Mount Sinai after the creation of the Golden Calf, to be greeted by wordless cries demanding interpretation:

"When Joshua heard the sound of the people in its boisterousness, he said to Moses, “There is a cry of war in the camp.

But he answered,

“It is not the voice of those who scream in mastery, 

neither is it the voice of those who scream for being overcome: 

the voice of screaming do I hear.” (Exodus, 32: 17-18)

The linkage to the Golden Calf is illuminating. 

The Calf was created out of Israel's inability to deal with existential uncertainty--out of a need for safety, a desire for a god they could control. “Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for we do not know what has happened to that man Moses" (Exodus 32: 1). The Golden Calf is God without the terrifying Otherness; the intermediary without the originator. 

This is a role that parallels that of the Ark of Covenant here: “Why did God put us to rout (nagaf) today before the Philistines?" the Israelites ask--the word "rout" n'g'f synonymous with "plague", suggesting a defeat by divine order. Yet rather than attempting to answer this question by turning to the terrifying, unknowable God of Knowings (as Hanna named Him), they decide to "fetch the Ark of the Covenant of God  from Shiloh, to be present among us and deliver us from the hands of our enemies.”

The identity of the savior here is ambiguous--is it God, or the intermediary Ark? 

The slipage becomes more pronounced in the reaction of the Philistines, who declare: "God has come to the camp!" making Him plural: "These are the same God who struck down Egypt..." The plurality that Hanna identified in God--whom she named Lord of Hosts;  Lord of Minds, multi-faceted and unknowable--is here reduced to an idolatrous merging of God with the "Ark of the Covenant of GOD of Hosts Enthroned on the Cherubim." The priests, Hofni and Pinhas, play a role parallel to that of their ancestor, Aaron, creator of the Golden Calf. Their "taking" of the Ark reflects Hofni and Pinhas's initial sin of seeking to force the divine: "Give it to me or I will take," they say, grabbing the gifts meant for God; reducing God's "hosts" (tzva'ot) to the women who "congegate" (tzovot) around Shilo, or to the literal Israelite and Philistine armies (tzvaot); 

The attempt to force and manipulate God via His tangible symbol becomes here the source of destruction. If the priests thought they could "take" the Ark at will, they leave it  to be taken. The wordless jubilation at the coming of the Ark, which echoed the wordless celebration of the Calf--becomes the screams of mourning at its taking--in a separation of the symbol from the symbolized. 

Samuel 3: In Writing

It's only a matter of time, 
he says, till they try again. 
There may be a warning-- 
there may not. So just know.
Everybody says. 

Sun ricochets off the waves

and the siren begins

ereely unconstrained.

Bathers stampede towards the changing huts.

I crouch over my baby

tell the preschooler arms over her head

It's nothing, I say. Nothing

to fear. The wail dies.

See, not even a boom, I sooth.

These days, these weeks,

in a shark mouth

propped open with a stick 

ready to snap.

An egret scries the murkey water

then plungers, silver

flailing in her beak.

Two weeks till first grade,

two weeks till kindergarten

We balance at the soupy cusp

of the turning year.

Samuel: Chapter 3

 The fraught moment

Before

it all begins

it all ends

For full chapter, click here

This chapter continues where the previous one closed, reiterating and amplifying the prophecy regarding the fall of the House of Eli.

As in the previous chapter, Samuel and the sons of Eli are repeatedly juxtaposed, in an implicit yet insistent link. Every description of the sins of Eli's sons is bookended by descriptions of Samuel's virtue; Samuel here becomes Eli's "son", after the two biological sons fail so completely. He is the beloved usurper, stepping into the place of the rejected priests. In this chapter, Samuel's linkage with the destruction of Hofni and Pinhas becomes more explicit, as he actually speaks the words of doom. With the rise of the "naar" (youth) Samuel, Eli's "nearim" fall.      

Their fate was already been inscribed with the previous chapter's prophecy. What this chapter adds is the element of time. Samuel hears God speak "on that very day," and prophesies about "that very day" that will bring destruction that lasts "forever." A key word of the chapter is terem--before, not yet. The light of God has not yet gone out; Samuel has not yet heard God voice, he does not yet know God. We stand at the cusp, in the expectant before. The silence that precedes the storm that will end Eli; before Samuel regularly communes with God. 

Samuel 2: In Writing

And the wind. The drifting bubbles

The kites with streamers

that soar and swoop and crash.

 The world perches on stilts

and likes to flip

off the tightrope

spanning the abyss–

fall down to the taut plain

balanced on posts

only to bounce up again. 

A costumed woman with a crown of stars

Turns in an undulating banner.

Behind her all things wind-driven and fragile:

Kites, crepe, whirligigs,

sugarfloss that melts to the tongue. 

a woman with a rainbow wrapped baby.

My baby runs between the shadows--

I will never wrap him again.

My daughter's keens as her string tangles

my son crying because the tassels tear,

because it flies

because it won't fly

because it falls.  

 

Walls disappear in a sudden gust 

that sends kites spinning. 

Hold on tight for the next turn

Samuel: Chapter 2

 

You can be raised from the depths 

or plunged in free fall

in a world that perches on stilts

For full chapter, click here

Confession: I completed this drawing a lifetime ago--before the war with Iran started. I delayed photographing it because my grand plan of using both sides of the page hit a snag, as the notebook started to fall apart. I did not solve the notebook issue, but am now am trying to pick up the threads of my thought post-apocalypse, returning to the project. Again. 

Crisis. Restart. Crisis. Restart. This has become the pulse underlying Bibliodraw, and is perhaps appropriate for this chapter, which focuses on mutability--on a world in which all is conditional, and can be flipped in a moment. 

The chapter opens by returning to, and emphasizing, Chana's radical redefinition of prayer.  And Chana prayed , once again using the new reflexive term va-titpalal (ותתפלל). The chapter, through subtle wordplay, draws attention to this new word for prayer in 2:25: If someone sins against another person, God may intercede ((p'l'l פלל, lit. "arbitrate" "judge" ); but if someone offends against GOD, who can intercede (יתפלל) ?” Prayer is now intimate, interactive, reflexive, connecting heart and mouth,  inside to outside. "My heart exhalts...my mouth opens wide". Hanna, through prayer, links to the intimacy of the "God of knowings" (el deot), who knows multiple minds, but is also multitudinous. 

Indeed, this is the essence of her thanksigving prayer: God is the anchor around which  "all acts are measured", yet his multitudinous means that the world is inherently unsteady, in flux. Everything can transform into its opposite, God containing both sides of the binary: the satiated may become hungry, the barren full, life and death, the netherworld and exhaltation, poor and noble, the humiliated and the proud  all can morph into each other. 

The chapter then proceeds to demonstrate this thesis, as Eli is given a prophecy about the coming fall of his dynasty: "I had intended for you and your father’s house to remain in My service forever. But now—declares GOD—far be it from Me!" Even the priesthood that was granted to Aaron as a gift that could not be questioned is not immutable. The foundational structures of the nation depend on the relationship to God. The "enduring house" will be reserved for a new, "fatheful" priest.  

It is within this fraught context that the idea of kingship is introduced. In a final departure from Judge's,  era "when there was no king in Israel, each did what was right in his own eyes" Hanna concludes her exhaltant prayer with the call: "God will judge the ends of the earth— / Giving power to the king, / And triumph to the anointed one.".  This call forshadows a new political era. Yet it also intimates that the king will not be the stabilizing force foreseen by Moses.  Rather, he will be part of the world of flux and revsersals, where even the greatest of gifts can be taken away by a God that judges the very "ends of the earth" allowing them to transform --ourobourous like-- into each other. 

Samuel 1: In Writing

 There is heft to sadness

a hard brittleness to grief--

it etches the edges

of the unspoken

the black maw 

no sound can breach. 

Lips, teeth, tunneling

gullet. All the sloughed-

off selves.

Masticated

crushed and swallowed.

 

See me, I pray. 

Remember who

I am, when I

myself have forgotten. 

Samuel: Chapter 1

 

Watch for the lips--the edges

where the bitter inside

pours forth 

See me, and remember.

For full chapter, click here

"There was a man...from the hill country of Ephraim"--the opening of this book echoes the opening of the final section of Judges, a perfect replica if not for the additional detail of the hometown of Rammatayim. Indeed, the chapter is dense with intertextual links to the closing of Judges, the juxtaposition acting as an implicit commentary. 

As in the case of Michah, the story of the "man" very quickly becomes a story about his relationship to women--in Judges, Micah's mother; here, Elkana's two wives. We are given two levels of reality: the official story of the "man", and the teaming complex story of the family. The House of God in Shilo--which animates the backdrop of Judges as the  option rejected by the Dannites, and as the home of the abducted dancing girls--here moves center stage. Now, for the first time, it plays the unifying role Moses envisioned, presented as a locus of pilgrimage miyamim yemima (another direct echo of the closing of Judges).  As in Judges, we have a story of barrenness, and the promise of a Nazarite from before conception, whose hair will never be touched by a razor.  As in the closing of Judges, this is a story that places vows at the center.

Yet these very similarities highlight the essential differences. 

If the closing of the Book of Judges utterly reduces women to their reproductive function, here, relationship is placed at the center: Penina has children, yet it is Hanna who is beloved, "though God had sealed her womb." "Am I not better to you than ten sons?" Elkana pleads. 

If vows, up to this point, have been the most potent expression of patriarchal control, with a father and husband given the right to undo a woman's vows, while men's vows act to suppress female freedom, here it is a woman who makes the vow--and her husband acquiesces. "Do what is good (tov) in your eyes," Elkana says--the very expression is a subtle variation of the closing refrain of Judges "each man did what was just (yashar) in his eyes." From a "man's" search for justice, we move to a woman's search for "good".

At the center of this chapter is an act of prayer--one utterly different than what we have seen before. In the Book of Judges, the nation screams and weeps to God, at times with implicit blame. Hanna, by contrast, engages in an initiate conversation. From the "bitterness of her soul", she is mitpalel--the first use of the reflexive form that eventually became the standard Hebrew word for prayer: to intercede/ judge oneself. The reflexive act implies that this conversation acts not only on God, but on Hanna's deeper self. "Hanna was speaking to her heart", discovering her own interiority and "hard spirit." "Her lips moved, but her voice was not heard" outwardly--only within. See me, she pleads. "Remember me, do not forget." 

If in the story of the concubine, speaking to a girl's "heart" implies manipulation and coercion, here it becomes an act of intimacy and strength. If Jephtha is destructively committed to the "utterings of his mouth," here the vow remains outwardly unuttered, existing as an internal promise. 

This act of prayer is so radically new, Eli, the high priest, does not know what to make of it, mistaking it for intoxication. "No, my lord. A woman of hard spirit am I,"  Hanna responds with quiet strength. This prayer is not an act of imbibing, but rather of pouring fourth. And Eli recognizes her authority, granting her request.  

If the closing of Judges depicts widening ripples of dissolution--from family, to tribe, to nation--this chapter presents an opposing movement: a growing interiority, reflected in a supportive relationship, which ripples outward to impact the House of God.