from "Bellow in Jerusalem" by Paul Berman (Tablet, January 21, 2020):
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In the single most remarkable passage of Bellow’s To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow frets over his own ability to see and appreciate miracles and supernatural astonishments. He wants to see and appreciate, but he worries that he does not have the capacity to do anything of the sort. In this one respect, he resembles Chateaubriand pretty closely, give or take every conceivable difference. Chateaubriand had an exciting experience in the Jewish Quarter, but that was only because of exceptional qualities that, in his view, adhered to Jerusalem and the Jews. Mostly Chateaubriand considered that, for an intelligent man like himself, attuned to the modern ideas of 1809, it was no longer possible to undergo supernatural astonishments. Tasso in the 16th century could see supernatural creatures flit through the sky. But after Tasso came Isaac Newton and the scientists and the modern age, and, no matter how keenly Chateaubriand wished he could do what Tasso could do, the era of supernatural sightings had come to an end. It was distressing.
Still, Chateaubriand felt that, without showing any disrespect for science and its discoveries, it was still possible to catch glimmers of a more-than-natural truth, if only by gazing with sufficient intensity at ancient ruins and cemeteries, or at treetops, or leaves, or gardens, or at anything at all, where a vibration of eternity might be discovered. He gazed, then. He was good at gazing. He also knew how to sob and tremble at what he saw, and he took his own sobbings and tremblings as scientific confirmation that he was actually seeing what he thought he was seeing.
But Bellow’s difficulties were graver. Deeply he yearned to sob and tremble in the Romantic style; and, just as deeply, he knew that science had continued to advance, which made the sobbings and tremblings seem ridiculous. He shuddered in embarrassment at the absurdity of his own yearnings. And, in recording his Jerusalem experiences, he paused to contemplate the Romantic yearnings and the modern embarrassments alike.
The Jerusalem sky reminds him of the psalmist who sings of “God’s garment of light.” He wonders if, in gazing upward at the sky, he isn’t seeing the garment:
You can take this seriously in Jerusalem. A character in one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s extraordinary stories thinks, looking at the sky in Israel, “No, this isn’t just an ordinary khamsin but a flame from Sinai. The sky above is not just atmosphere but a heaven with angels, seraphim, God.” This is Jewish transcendentalism, too, in a very different part of the mind. With Singer it comes out as though a spring were pressed at the appropriate moments in a story. My inclination is to resist the imagination when it operates in this way.
Bellow’s relation to Singer is pretty much Chateaubriand’s relation to Tasso. Bellow is envious. He hopes that, with sufficient effort, maybe he can, in fact, achieve a Jewish transcendentalism, just as Singer did. It is a matter of adopting the right mental state. He needs to give himself permission.
Yet I, too, feel that the light of Jerusalem has purifying powers and filters the blood and the thoughts; I don’t forbid myself the reflection that light may be the outer garment of God.
Bellow in this passage is at his guesthouse in Jerusalem, Mishkenot Sha’ananim, which overlooks Mount Zion. He continues:
I go to the door and look toward the Judean Desert. I see not so much the terrain as the form of some huge being. Its hide is gray. The distant small buildings are gray also. Letting down the barriers of rationality, I feel that I can hear Mount Zion as well as see it.
About Mount Zion:
There is no reason this hill should have a voice, emit a note audible only to a man facing it across the valley. What is there to communicate? It must be that a world from which mystery has been extirpated makes your modern heart ache and increases suggestibility. In poetry you welcome such suggestibility. When it erupts at the wrong time (in a rational context) you send for the police; these psychological police drive out your criminal “animism.” Your respectable aridity is restored. Nevertheless, I will not forget that I was communicated with.
He also does not forget that, scientifically speaking, all of this is nonsense. In order to see the garment of God or hear the rumbling voice of Mount Zion, he has to perform a mental maneuver capable of letting down “the barriers of rationality.” Down go the barriers. And the whole experience leaves him feeling the way the heroes of his novels do—the befuddled professors in Chicago or New York who would like to abandon themselves to wild contemplation of the divine and the miraculous, and who recognize meanwhile how laughable they are: inadequate nobodies who cannot begin to cope with their frightening wives and the big-city gangsters and tycoons, let alone the cosmos and its mystic secrets.
The difference between To Jerusalem and Back and Bellow’s novels is that, in the Jerusalem book, he does not present himself as a daffy professor, comically unequal to the challenges of life. He is, on the contrary, the sort of man who is invited to attend White House receptions, someone for whom Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, sets aside valuable time. A worldly and successful man. Happily married, too, he and his Romanian mathematician—though, to be sure, anyone who has read the novels knows that marital stability was not Saul Bellow’s strong point.
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