I was going to discuss the minimalist works of the previous entry in this one but had so much trouble simply setting the entry up due to my deranged computer and/or my blogsite’s programming, that I couldn’t continue after losing half my commentary, who knows why.  In desperation, I scanned another piece that was in Irving Weiss’s Number Poems (The Runaway Spoon Press, 1997) and managed to post it here:

Nifty visiopoetic portrait of a lady, I think.  I haven’t tried super-hard to read the writing but suspect it consists of various scribbled female names–one is Echo.   Wait, at the top are Scylla and Daphne.  I now suspect these are all nymphs or the like who suffered badly at the hands of various gods and goddesses–hence, if full life only a moment.  And en masse here a barely legible flurry representative of all the feminine magic and mystery of the old religions now long-gone.

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This one’s quite a bit different from yesterday’s–to show you the range of the work in Irving Weiss’s new Identities:

It seems wonderfully to represent the Jewish/Hebrew/Yiddish/Middle-Eastern experience–to Gentile me.  I recognized “Moishe” as a Jewish name, but looked it up on the Internet to check and found out that, as I should have known, it is also a Hebrew (or Yiddish) Variant of “Moses,” which was Egyptian.  But I’d already interpretted the work to be about the Exodus (“Moses” already being written in it)–and about the whole Jewish experience–the quest for a home, the struggle against . . . near-Hell? but certainly the hostility of the desert.  But also, for me, the glorious triumph over, or out of, oppression both by Nature and by tribal enemies.  The magical (note the amount of astrology in the piece) triumph.  Knowing Irving, though, and having had a lot of Jewish friends throughout my life, and been exposed to a great deal of Jewish comedy–the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen (before he sold out to “seriousness”), I find a kind of irony, even farce in it–from its title, which suggests both an imploration of the Heroic Leader to get the tribe through its perils but also –well, calling a Jewish kid to dinner.  But I also take “Moishe” as a pun for “Mercy!” which would make the piece essentially about a final escape into a promised land not yet attained.

I could go on into a sociological analysis of Jewishness, which I do think I have a good idea of because they don’t seem to me that much different from me, if different at all (one reason I got quite involved in geneology was the hope that I’d find out that at least one of my ancestors was Jewish; the closest were all the Protestants who were the heretics of their time).  No time for that.  I’ll just repeat that this piece seems to me a powerful, far-ranging expression of Judaism.  And a wonderfully moving piece of verbo-visual art whatever it is taken to mean!

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