On Yona Wallach
In this essay on Yona Wallach's life and work, and the illness that proved decisive for both, Aharon Shabtai fuses personal memories of the poet with a perceptive reading of her work. “The force of the shocking illness requires the creation of new codes and syntax, requires the operation of puppets, hollow masks suddenly filled with blood and life, the recycling of all emotional waste.”
One evening, when I was in Tel Aviv, someone knocked on the door, brought her in and left. With little or nothing by way of introductions or pleasantries a friendship formed, and over the course of a month we met often, until I came to my senses and went back to my regular routine and my studies in Jerusalem. I was older, and, in retrospect, it seems that for a little while at least I played the role of a father figure. Yona herself was always creating a father and destroying a father at one and the same time. She would wander around in her beatniky get-up and way, wasting time, astonishing and horrifying the people who were sitting at the Frak Café. This was how she explained herself to herself, how she was able to disintegrate and reconstruct or regenerate herself. This was her logos. The parents she constructed were demons of a kind – the pursuing-pursued non-parents of a schizoid-paranoid perspective.
The twenty-year-old Yona Wallach was a mystic from the start. She sought out “life’s revelation”, though this sort of knowledge – “no man could see it and live” – meant death, meant becoming an I that was not-I; revealing life, in other words, meant leaving life behind – carrying out on oneself a sparagasmos (a Dionysian act of dismemberment), and so, according to the modal logic of the experience, depression and anxiety were transformed into a mania:
Yes. I take that upon myself. There was Jesus and after him there had to be Yona. God wanted to be revealed again on the stage of history, and one can’t continue without Him. Life is pointless without God. Maybe He wasn’t particularly thrilled that I found him. Maybe this is one of those cosmic catastrophes, something that neither He nor I brought on, and there are other gods beyond God. This is the God of the middle, but there is another god of nature, who creates us and is the true god, the enormous and powerful god, and we’re in his hands, we’re his tools. And it may be that my fate was to reveal him. Take the poem ‘Black Hand’ – how could I have written a poem like that? I wrote it without thinking, it was totally unconscious. I was simply a medium. I’m a parapsychologist, I have sense. I’m a mystic. I take hold of the forces of the world.
The knowledge evident here is clearly a ‘gnosis’. Yona’s behavior could be described along the lines both of Melanie Klein’s theories and those of the Kabbala: she splits, she’s split, she gives birth to herself and in the process empties herself and is annihilated as a microcosm and a macrocosm. She descends among the husks in order to raise up the sparks, or shatters the husks with the force of the sparks within her. She doesn’t sit at home, as she puts it, and cultivate her soul; she runs around with perverts and crooks – she distinguishes between them and their husks. Each one of them she sees “with his very own eyes.”
The concept of a self is critical in this context, and without it one simply can’t understand Yona Wallach. On the one hand Yona is an example of a selfless person; her story is that the self is stolen away with birth. She is overly split, invaded by foreign I’s, and so in fact doesn’t exist in the here and now. Basic aspects of life are familiar to her only in a cerebral manner: she creates words, but not life, in the sense that life is created when one knows how to make use of love – something Yona doesn’t know. In gnosis, and in mysticism as well, there is a degree of lifelessness – on the one hand the music of the spheres, on the other a kind of arid compulsion, detachment and esotericism. All these are factors I felt coming through in her poems. Nevertheless, her major contribution was that she introduced to Hebrew literature the language of the self. She shattered the scarecrow of the I, and she began to speak in an absolute manner about the world, where “making the object” always meant “making the self.” There is a fixed, established I, but in her view there is another I, an I who, in poetry, has all sorts of opportunities to change. These things she says as a ‘parapsychologist’ and a born mystic: “I was born this way, my grandfather was a mystic in Russia. To this day people make pilgrimages to his grave, to pray for fertility.”
Around 1965, Yona gave me some pages from a notebook with her ‘Island Poems #1’ – this was in Tel Aviv. Later on I spent a weekend with her in her hometown of Kiryat Ono. That Saturday afternoon we sat on the porch, and I spoke with reservation about the hybrid quality of the poems she’d given me. I was looking for a direct, clear rhetoric without eccentricity, and so I didn’t like her early poems – about Jonathan, Cecilia, Sebastian, Antonia, and so on. It all seemed somehow capricious to me, and deep down I felt they gave off a sense of illness and satisfaction with illness. I think that the blindness I displayed at the time had its place, that it was vital in fact, and emerged from a correct reading of her mode. And Yona too became conscious in her poems and in interviews of the masochism that had taken root in our literature and, as a means of reflecting on life, backed it into a dead end: “That’s the main thing about poetry, that it likes to be miserable, and not actually say things, not solve problems, not be wise. It likes to teach people to be miserable, and to think melancholy thoughts and build the future in abjection and then be ill.” The compelling quality about misery is that it is an inviolable narcissistic stance. But misery and illness have distinct contents of various sorts.
Yona, it turns out, was speaking in a code that I couldn’t understand at the time. By splitting into characters, and shifting from gender to gender, she was telling her first story, her ‘theogony’ – which was born to give birth to her progenitors. The story of the first minute of life is that the infant finds a parent (actually); or vice versa, the roles are reversed and the parent finds in the infant a parent who will fulfill him or her and offer emotional nourishment. The infant then becomes the parent. From there on everything is demonic and under tremendous pressure, for things can no longer be located in their proper place. The parent is a God, but this God is actually Yona, and promptly turns into Satan, a haunting figure and a threat to existence; for it murdered the infant and in doing so stole (through Yona) Yona’s identity. Yona is the baby that hasn’t been born – that exists only in thought, in the mind of another, who in turn is only a thought in her head. Yona operates in this way often in her work. Her job is to give birth to herself, but that birth involves necessity, according to the rhythm I’ve described – the rhythms of the illness. When the baby is the parent, everything is inverted and each object becomes its opposite: “Good turns into evil, the violence of pain becomes pleasant, and vice versa of course/ and sound turns into matter and matter in turn to anti-matter and knowledge to anti-knowledge/ and the real becomes what’s imagined, and vice versa, and you are anti-you,” and so “emotion like an atom’s nucleus post-explosion gives off maximum radioactivity/ in the unorganized dispersal of fall-out” (‘Hierarchy’).
The most important thing that happened to Hebrew poetry in 1965, then, was the discovery of the language of the self, the language of a double life. One no longer said “either this or that”, and “that equals that”, but “this and that”, and “that’s different from that”. This is the wisdom that Yona inherited from “her fathers the magical hunters”. She speaks about a mystical light, which she distinguishes from the light of day; this mystical “wild light”, which bestows “understanding of the doubleness within her”, is a light that takes darkness into account, and only in this synthetic light, one can grasp things as general and particular, as nameless and possessors of name and meaning.
The illness is therefore that necessary night, without which it is impossible to arrive at “the hidden inner light.” This is the way down which is the way up; this is Yona’s way. Yona’s illness tells of the night without name, in which there is no emotional existence. The illness is to go through birth once again as a not-I, to be united with the not-I, and to reconstruct, while learning the language of the self, the continuity of the I-not-I. And this is something that few people understand – that it’s impossible and even undesirable to rid oneself of trauma, to rid one’s consciousness of the layer where the monster lies. One can only listen to it, and then, as Yona writes, “the knowledge [it offers] turns into a softer material.” The illness is the language of health; language is our oxygen, it creates health.
So we can say that illness belongs to the forces of life. Life demands dismantling, not only construction. The force of the shocking illness requires the creation of new codes and syntax, requires the operation of puppets, hollow masks suddenly filled with blood and life, the recycling of all emotional waste. As in the poems of John Donne, the synthetic effort in Yona’s work creates a metaphysical poetry. Its object is so profoundly heterogeneous (in the sense of the gaps, displacements, differences in quality) that, in the effort to contain and construct the whole, a new order is created, one that is more just, more enlightened. Yona manages to bring together body and soul, consciousness, gender and emotion, and from Hell creates an Eden.
This essay was written shortly before Wallach’s death in 1985 and appeared in Hebrew in the Israeli review Hadarim. Also published in Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach, translated by Linda Zisquit. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1997. ISBN 1-878818-54-6.
