Eros and Thantos.
From "Izirim"/Warner
In one of the most memorable scenes in Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow-Up", the fashion photographer Thomas (British actor David Hemmings) stands in the center of his studio, developing and enlarging repeatedly an image of a couple of lovers that he had taken a few hours earlier in the park small in London, and discovers there in the bushes a man with a gun and then a man's body.
Antonioni actually conducts a kind of discourse around the well-known coupling of Eros and Tantus - a "covetous pair" of concepts that appears, among other things, in Freud's book "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" - the betrothed life force and sexuality, which appears side by side with the force of ecstasy, destruction, ionization and death.
Loyal to this concept, the author and editor of the journal "Mazanim" Tamar Marin, in the opening of the new and successful issue entitled "Sin", writes the following: "...Sin itself embodies within itself not only the pole of life, pleasure and enjoyment, but also the Death, destruction and decay...".
And later - "...sex can itself become a real war zone, either in intimate relationships... or in its political literature that invades intimate relationships as an instrument of control and as a means to sow terror and destruction...".
In other words - the explosive record of the interpersonal and social relationship also leaves its mark on what happens in the bedroom or in other arenas between a man and a woman, a man with a man and a woman with a woman.
This whole compact system is expressed here in a series of short stories and poems, most of which were probably written after the events of Shiva in October.
There are short stories here by talented writers such as Carmit Rosen, Rita Kogan, Anat Einhar, Rinat Schneider, Omri Horesh, Yonatan Finn and more.
"Libra" magazine cover, December 2023/illustration: Roni Hajaj
Hebrew literature, as Merin rightly points out, manages a complex and tortuous system with descriptions of gender and sexuality.
Something in her remained at the very beginning ashamed and inhibited and punctuated by quite a bit of concealment and feelings of guilt, which date back to the stories of Brenner, Agnon and Gensin, also because these three giants ultimately came from a rather religious home, even if they later traveled a long, complex road, full of bumps and pitfalls and managed A difficult dialogue with the liberal and secular value system.
The 1960s and 1970s, with bold poets such as Meir Wieseltier, Yitzhak Laor and Yona Wallach, "opened a button in the shirt" to put it a little crudely, and pulled up her underwear over the Hebrew language in order to speak naturally from the groin area as well - an area that also sometimes contains subdued violence and a turbulent space and wild
This issue of "Libra", as mentioned, climbs another step on this rickety ladder.
On the gender side, here is an interesting article by Dr. Hana Herzig about the "female voice heard at a level", in which she examines the books of Noa Yadlin ("The Wrong Book"), Avivit Mashmari ("The Real Estate Novel") and Maya Arad ("Jealous of Writers") - three books that focus on the heroine who is a writer and on the question of what women's literature is.
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On the sex side, the successful stories, and there are quite a few, work well when mixed with an impressive command of the language.
Here is a small example from the story "The Fifth" by Anat Einhar: "Only then did she allow herself," she writes about the heroine of the story, "to move in with him in an apartment with a small kitchen with a washing machine stuck in the middle and her belly rolling his few clothes, and also the old refrigerator, Narrow in stature like his owner, he was ascetic and picky, and the bars of his shelves shone in the electric cold like bare ribs..."
An ashtray that has a belly, and shiny shelves of a refrigerator like bare ribs... Einhar very skillfully succeeds in stripping the objects and turning them into a "body".
creative
Stimulated.
Vulnerable of course.
As mentioned, this is the ability to talk about sexuality not only through the contents (these are also found in Einhar's short story to a large extent) but also through the many tools in this case that the Hebrew language makes available (not only in the sexual sense).
A short and beautiful story called "The Boy and the Falcon" by Omri Khoresh offers the same mastery of the language and also another thing: most of the stories were written, as I understand it, after the events of the Shevah in October, and here in Khoresh's story, which describes, among other things, a sexual encounter between the hero and a soldier who will probably return Soon to his unit.
The existence of that predatory and predatory bird in the story adds another dimension of sadness and terror, even if not a word is explicitly said about it.
The claws of the gnawing image very wisely squeeze in, holding us firmly in the head and hair already from the first row.
And speaking of a strong image that sticks in our heads and accompanies the reading - the movie "Instincts", which I mentioned at the beginning, was inspired by a short story called "The Devil's Rock" by the well-known Argentinian writer Julio Cortzar.
To the best of my recollection, nowhere in Cortsar's story does a corpse appear, but re-reading it after watching Antonioni's film, charges it with new meaning.
Or in other words - writing about sex always joyfully invades the imagined space.
One of the favorite sayings of therapists in the field of sexology is that the largest sex organ in the human body is the brain.
Good literature always knows how to make judicious use of this definition.
Not always just a defiant mention of genitals (cock, pussy, pubic hair) can make a lot of blood flow in the spaces of daring, but as mentioned a rich and interesting use of the tools that the Hebrew language knows how to offer.
As at the end of Einhar's successful story, you really feel like biting into the raw flesh of the text, and in any case, even in the crazy days we are all going through, it is appropriate to leave the protected space for a moment and stay a little longer in the wild space that literature knows how to offer.
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"Libra" issue, December 2023, published by the Hebrew Writers Association.
102 pages.
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