Isaac Babel and Slash

And recently I've come to look forward most to my Sunday dinners. I plan for it all week long, thinking about what I haven't made in a long time, and what I've always wanted to be able to make. This last Saturday, my roommate Jimmy found me draining liquids from reconstituted yuba, chopping the sheets into fine bits, seasoning them, and them wrapping those diced bits with seaweed and another full sheet of yuba. What are you making, he asked me, and I told him fish, like Jesus. And I explained to him that it's like Jesus because where once there wasn't fish, there is now because the fish that I was making wasn't fish, really, but a vegan gluten free dish inspired by the flavors of fish, so once there was no fish(y flavored thing) and now there's enough of a fish(y flavored thing) to feed a table full of people. Jimmy didn't quite think that this quite fit the parable, or at least it wasn't presented as a parable of Jesus and the fish (for one thing he told me that it's not a parable, but a story, and I was thinking that maybe it was a parable to illustrate how maybe it was after all a parable to show that while we start out with only so much of ourselves, love and caring isn't confined by how much we are but how much we give out, and we can give out enough to feed many, many people, but then you have the difference in our religious background, I suppose)

Over dinner we talked briefly about Isaac Babel because Laura had his “Red Calvary” on hold waiting to be picked up, and I told her that there was no need to pick it up because I have the complete works of Isaac Babel that she can read instead, and someone asked who Isaac Babel was and I told her that he was a Russian-Jewish author, instrumental in the development of the short story, who died either in the gulag or was executed by the firing squad, I didn't remember which. It wasn't until later when I got home that I remembered that both were true – it's said that he was sent to the gulag, but the truth is he was probably executed, but definitely tortured before he confessed to be an enemy of the state, who was rounded up with Stalin's cleansings, and what's notable about his death is that when they came to arrest him, when they knocked down his door and led him out of his house, away from his family, he said to the heavens, “I just needed more time.” More time! Isaac Babel who translated grandfather Sholem Aleichem's works from the Yiddish to Russian in order to “Feed his soul.” Who said, “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” Whose unwritten works are alongside the unwritten works of souls like beautiful Bruno Schulz and the tragedian John Kennedy Toole in a library with walls made from ideas and dreams, walls that are built higher every time you have an idea or emotion that you can't express. Who are all working away right now, a lamps on their desks, faces burried in their work; who are only inturrupted once a day when a woman with sweet round arms and auburn hair, embroidery on her shirt, comes into their study to deliver them a cup of warm tea and kiss them on the forehead before she tells them that they are doing such good work and then recedes out the door again.

After the fish dinner was done and the plates cleared, put away, and after a bowl of almond-milk based ice cream over top of a brownie with some maple syrup, Laura and I were in the living room and Sarah waved a reiki wand over Jimmy's stomach and I talked about an interview that aired that morning with Slash, formerly of the rock group Guns N' Roses. I started the day indifferent to the guitarist, but the interview made me annoyed as Slash answered the interviewer's questions, seeming like a cliché of a rockstar. Deeper and deeper we went into this caricature, interrupted occasionally with clips from Use Your Illusion volumes one and two. They cut to the last clip that they were going to play, and it was the only one during the interview that wasn't from Slash's Guns N' Roses days. It's a song about some guy doing something during the end of the world, which again makes me wonder about how uninspired this guy is, and the interviewer asked Slash about what he would want to do during the lead-up to the end of the world, and this question for me is a slam dunk because it's so easy, and my first reaction is to be annoyed now not only at the guitarist but also at the interviewer for lobbing such a boring question like that; because any man worth his salt would answer that he would want to spend those hours leading to the end of the world, that time before the four stallions descend from the sky, the moments leading into a solar flare wrapping its arms around this earth and hugging it to a cinder, in an embrace with the woman he loves, having just made love and her head on his shoulder as they both lay with their eyes halfway closed, but Slash's answer wasn't this at all but instead he wants to play a raucous, rocking concert in front of millions of people, one of those concerts at a stadium with horrible acoustics, where everything, no matter how close your seats, is far away. This is where my turn on Slash became complete. Because my answer to this end of the world question is absolutely the correct one. The priorities of someone just wanting to be a spectacle at the end is only slightly less worse that the priorities of those people who are attending a concert to watch the spectacle, or the people at the front gates of the end of the world concert scalping tickets.

It was later in the evening again that I was thinking about Isaac Babel. Remembering his death at the hands of a nervous state – one afraid of having theirs icy hearts pierced by his periods. I noticed my own hypocrisy. For Isaac Babel, the end of the world came when two Soviet guards rapped on his door and invited themselves in. His end of the world came when the secret police placed him in the car. When he signed the confessions, his blood from the torture staining the paper. In this end of the world, he rescinded his confession and begged for one thing, that he be allowed to finish his work. Like a musician asking for one more concert.