Yiftach Aloni Sofer, poet and architect
Founder and editor-in-chief of "Afik - Israeli Literature", founder and editor-in-chief of "The Short Story Project - Ferry".
Author of the book "Lost" (Afik Publishing)
Yiftach Aloni, we are at the height of the great freedom, the period when in the days of their correction, Israelis find themselves traveling and traveling around the globe. You decided to write a book about travel, "Lost" (Afik Publishing), which came out at a time when most of us are grounded. What suddenly is a book about travel?
"The question I ask myself is why only now. I grew up in Kibbutz Gvulot, and loneliness made me create stories for myself. An imaginary world was created for me that in a way relies on reality. Ever since I can remember I am a person writing, not a drawer. It is from a desire to create a world. , Through the words, and you move about this world, gliding between imagination and reality. It's a kind of relationship. A movement between DOING and BEING, between doing and being.
"On one of my trips to South America I met a shaman, who told me a very interesting thing: 'Everyone has a lot of Hebrews, like there are futures, and when I meet someone, I first ask him who owns him.' "The most cliché. My owner in many ways was the frenzy, the movement, the search. To give meaning to the occurrence, because there is something in the soul that seeks meaning. And my journeys were the connection to that side, and also the liberation from it in some ways."
The book has six short stories, and one of them, "Each and His Everest," reads: "Perhaps the journey is a pilgrimage to a simple and clear natural language." There is something in the journey that allows you to move away, to examine your life in proportion. Do you find in journeys, certainly those that can be lost, a balm for the soul? An internal connection to a clearer language?
"The thinker and philosopher Walter Benjamin said that attention is the desire of the whole soul. The Dalai Lama emphasizes that the necessary journey is the journey inward, and the real pilgrimage is the pilgrimage inward. A journey is an experience, and everyone can experience it differently. Some people ascend a line 4 in Allenby and go through a meaningful experience, and they have enough of a movement that takes place in the mind without moving.
"Journey is also a difficult, complex genre, in the sense that it includes going out of the way, getting out of the diary, order, and reaching a state of sucking from the root. "Part of the journey is coming to terms with your essence, and creating compassion for it, and at the same time - looking at the other and knowing that you really have no chance of understanding him."
You mentioned the things the Dalai Lama said to her mother. You have met him before and interviewed him in Dharamsala. What else do you remember from meeting him?
"The open and direct talk, the laughter, the feeling that this is a 'eye-level' conversation and that we are both equal in the deep human sense, pass here, and there is nothing too much to do about ourselves. I think it is possible to talk about our mothers and fathers, beyond the seriousness allegedly present when novice like me meets an intellectual order of the Dalai Lama.
"perhaps, I venture to think, the children sit met the child in him, otherwise I do not know understand what he sees in me or talk, and why he allowed the continuation of the conversation for two hours - when the source is Scheduled for 20 minutes. "
The necessary journey is the journey inward.
The Dalai Lama // Photo: GettyImages,
Expanding the boundaries of the imagination
In the first story in "Lost," "A Telenovela in the North Pole," the narrator says, "I never lose my way." You mentioned that you are addicted to the matter of the road, which must be a road, but on the other hand you also doubt its existence.
"In Lost I actually dismantle the obsessive search thing that I too in many ways am sick of, addicted to the idea that there is a way, which must be because I was promised, because I want to believe there is something for which it's all worth it.
" That there is no way, that all human effort is actually putting more and more question marks, and that there is no purpose. And this book is an ongoing quest that comes to my personal conclusion that there is no way, at least for me. That every "name" is in fact an enslaving factor. "
Writing is not a way for you?
"For me, writing about a journey is an exercise in imaginary autobiography: not in the sense of 'fiction', because all the characters, places and events took place in reality, but in the fact that the deep history of my life is a constant effort to deepen the imagination and expand its boundaries.
" A way, and perhaps no way at all, does not mean that one stops looking for it. Add to that the fact that we live in a society addicted to thrills; See it for example in reality shows - every time looking for a new edge, a new way. To differentiate, but perhaps with a slight imagination, in my travels I seek the other, the different. I probably have a hard time finding the inner peace over time, and there is something about it that has to do with where we live, who we are. "
That is, is there something in your travel experience that is also related to the fact that you are Israeli?
"I can say that Israel is my home for all sorts of reasons. In Israel there is a cultural complexity between the ultra-Orthodox, the secular, the Arab tribe. I also think that the Arab culture is a culture of a place, maybe even rigid regarding the place - which for me, as a secular Jew - does not exist. "Wandering or emigrating from here. Deep in my heart I love this place, and the fact that I live in it, but I can not say, as mentioned, that I can not wander from here. So is my existence as an Israeli actually related to the journeys I go through as a person? Probably so."
You deal in the book with quite a few phenomena of tyrants. why?
"It seems to me that we live in a time of deep longing for a father figure, not in the archetypal sense of male or female, but of grasping, something to hold on to, to look up to. Of the idea: I am the great parent, the one who knows what the right path is, how to walk it and make it good for you.
" Superhero, like in the movies! His power is in performance and in words, he knows how to create drama and use language cunningly '; An idea at its best, if you will. "
Alongside tyranny, you deal with the various stories of colonialism.
Each journey story in the book describes the complex and clever way of the new colonialism that operates in all areas of our lives. Gabon, to the subtle nuances in the way the Dalai Lama refers to pilgrimage to holy places like the Kailash;
And of course there are the wonderful journeys with Nurit Zarchi and Adina Bar-Shalom, which in a way are tangent to journeys with the Dalai Lama and the guru Ram Das. "
Thin nuances.
Kailash Mountain in Tibet // Photo: GettyImages,
Give up the myth
In a journey, do you connect with yourself or rather move away?
"For many years I just stopped. When I visited India, I used to dress the way I dress in Israel. I did not see the need to dress in the clothes of the place, I do not feel that it is me or that this cover somehow preserves the authenticity of the thing.
" , And in general, I'm also wondering about the concept of 'connecting to yourself'. Most often, if space assumes, the experience is one of freedom, the talk of which is deceptive in itself. Still, it is a feeling that exists, puts a big smile on the face and for me softens the relationship with the outside.
"Relationships are the heart of the matter in my eyes, the movement in and out, and maybe in the 'physical' journey everything is looser, the conditions and defenses are rolled up. I think that's what it's talking about as expanding consciousness. Should one roam the world for that? Maybe.
"But even beyond travel, ultimately existence, from my point of view, boils down to one thing - inhaling and exhaling. I've been to a lot of places, I recently got to see fish in Sinai, how beautiful they are, and yet, while you're underwater - there's something sublime about listening "Only for your own breaths. It's a wonderful thing to me. It's a way to make peace in all our parts."
Do you feel that you have succeeded in making peace in the different parts of you? You end the story of Adina Bar-Shalom with "I'm ordering more coffee, waiting." You close the last story with "Then I'll go where I want." Sounds like the road, there is no doubt, the search, is still far ahead of you.
"Look, I'm ending the story of the Dalai Lama with a kind of waiver. It's an important word, a waiver. A waiver of the myth too. A myth is a story, and you can tell a thousand stories about the same thing. You can enter a room from infinite places, from infinite doors. You know, there "A short story about a man who tries to enter a room, knocks on the door many times, tries again and again, and in the end he discovers that he is inside the room, and when the door opens - it opens outwards. Maybe that's my story, everyone's. We're already there."
But that does not stop you from going on more trips. In this context, we have not talked about your first journey. Do you remember him?
"In the past, before I set out on a journey, I was filled with anxiety, a terribly strange feeling. I wondered why this was happening to me? In some ways I connect it to a story that happened as a child, to my first journey if you will.
" As a kid I used to visit there quite often, and even wrote a story on the subject called 'the mud was hungrier than the sand'. And I went there, even though I knew there was quicksand in the wadi. Mud where every movement you make just makes you sink more. I was 6 and a half years old, and one time I got in the mud and started to sink. Fate wanted it and when I got to the chest area I touched the stone I was standing on. "
The stone stopped your sunset.
"Exactly. And I was just with my head outside, stuck in the mud. Suddenly a Bedouin who had just turned up there saw me, and tried to rescue me. He could not and decided to run to the kibbutz and call my father, who came with a car, with a crane, and finally managed to rescue me.
“For years I have been thinking about the interpretations of this event.
How did I get into this situation, and was it a desire to examine something?
After all, there was a pretty big risk I took here, which was accompanied by a pretty big anxiety, a real death anxiety.
I think that this desire to explore, to test, and at the same time to take a risk and understand that there is danger in it, that creates real anxiety - these are mental elements that express something within me.
What a test of a thing to its end.
In this case, the bitter end, which fortunately was not bitter. "
Journey is movement.
Bus passengers // Photo: Liron Moldovan,
Release from the puppet wires
You kind of enjoy flirting with death.
"I've gotten into extreme situations in my life, but I'm glad my mind is good in these situations. Travel is also a kind of examination of this man up in heaven. Like asking him - 'Say, what exactly are you going to do with me?'
Allow me to offer in the case of the swamp egg another interpretation, more earthly. Maybe as a child drowning in the mud you did not examine that in heaven, but your own father. You checked if he would come, if there would be anyone to save you.
"I go back to the same shaman I met before, and he told me 'there is no such thing as fate, you have a husband, and you have to be free from your husband.' Are parents a kind of husband? Maybe. .
"and the owner of the person pulling him like a marionette, and only when you cut the wires - become free.
Maybe even then, as a kid in a wadi sinking in the mud, I tried to check the wires, and maybe try to cut them, to see that I could manage on my own.
And maybe it was too early. "
Simple natural language.
Everest // Photo: Reuters,
Today you are still checking, trying to cut more wires?
"I think everyone checks, otherwise they stop living. You don't check?"
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