We look at alien grace,
unfettered
by any determined form,
and we say: balloon, flower,
heart, condom, opera,
lampshade, parasol, ballet.
Hear how the mouth,
so full
of longing for the world,
changes its shape?
—Mark Doty, “Difference”
Nahariya is the northernmost city on the Israeli coast—go further north than this, and you are in Lebanon. When I was studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I joined my friend Ilana when she went home to visit her parents there.
Ilana had only been in Jerusalem for a few months. Enrolled at Hadassah College for the coming fall semester, which began in October, she moved in with a friend and waitressed in a fish restaurant—more to say she had a reason to move early, she admitted to me later, than to make ends meet. After completing her two years of army service, she had lapsed into depression. Like most Israelis fresh out of mandatory service, she took time off to travel. But her journey ended in Goa, where she dabbled in hash, then ketamine and cocaine until she developed a serious heroin addiction. After a year of this, her parents intervened, and she told me it took her father going to India to bring her back.
She told me her story at a party on a balmy summer night, and I was drawn to her intense gaze as she spoke of her recovery, her two relapses and recent newfound interest in alternative health, how she’d attempted to treat her chronic sore throats by chewing fig tree leafs and gargling hot salt water, and her ever-aching joints with massages of camphor oil and magnet therapy. We were both 25, and she liked the fact that while she had yet to start her undergraduate studies, I already had a Master’s degree, and from a university in the States.
Maybe you’ll be a good influence on me, she said, touching my arm.
Maybe, I said, taking her hand. I have a Master’s in poetry, after all.
Isn’t poetry all about reaching the sublime?
Not always, I whispered in her ear. And in mine, rarely.
Maybe that will change. She gave me a half-smile, not ungraciously.
Maybe you’ll be a good influence on me, I said.
I was attracted to her, to her omnipresent half-smile in which she never gave herself completely to anyone, to her long, tangled hair, to the jangling of thin, rusty bangles she never took off her arms. But a romantic relationship was out of the question; she was very focused on not relapsing and on getting a degree. Once she noted that it seemed I was always seeing someone new, and that I could very easily break her already-cynical heart. She needed a friend, someone to support her, and I tried as much as I could, though I often found myself in my own precarious positions. Ilana came from a solid, middle-class home; her family supported her. She didn’t quite understand that I was on my own, financially and otherwise. I tried to explain that if I had ever developed a drug problem, my mother had told me she’d make sure I never set foot in her house again. That my parents both worked two jobs and had little to their names but their children, and they did not understand depression, nor would they recognize it.
Ilana laughed it off. She doesn’t mean it.
Who doesn’t mean what? I asked.
You mother would take you back, she said.
I thought of all the times my mother had kicked me out of the house for lesser offenses, such as talking back to her in a way she didn’t like. I thought of the nights in which I walked to neighbors’ homes to call friends to ask if I could stay the night, or two, depending on the severity of my mother’s anger. Then there were the resulting days I would call to see if I could come home again. I thought of my mother’s coldness on the phone, the aloof matter in which she treated me for days after. I thought of the day I graduated high school, and my mother said to me: I don’t mind if you visit, but you’re never living at home again, and I knew in my heart that though she loved me dearly, she would never take me in as Ilana’s parents had done.
Seriously, my parents would really like you, Ilana went on. If you came to visit, they’d see I’ve really changed. She spoke about winning back their trust, to show she was hanging out with the right kind of people, and again I wanted to help, so I agreed.
Ilana picked me up early on one Shabbat eve. Already the whole city was rushing in preparation for Shabbat; the traffic out of Jerusalem was terrible. Along the way, Ilana warned that Nahariya wasn’t exactly a trendy place. There were much sexier cities on the Mediterranean coast, and despite its ostensibly beautiful beaches, Nahariya had no sewage treatment plant. When tensions with neighboring Lebanon heated up, Katyusha rockets and other projectiles would fall on Nahariya. There was a small zoo, but she didn’t like animals being held captive; the cafes along the city’s main drag were full of tourists who were not young but an older, much more sedate crowd—so I shouldn’t expect to find the nightlife of Tel Aviv. Nahariya, she went on with that half smile of hers, means “river of God,” but she’d lived most of her life in Nahariya and found nothing sublime about it, nothing at all.
The more she talked, the more I realized she didn’t want to go home. But as we lurched forward in the gridlock, I realized I wanted to get out of Jerusalem, to get away from the noise and the unrelenting heat of the stifling room where I wrote in my journal instead of getting on with my research, mired in so many fractured poems I began and couldn’t finish, all those poems that came not from the sublime but from the bulldozers and never-ending roadwork on Jaffa Road, the coldness and obtuseness of Jerusalem stone, the city so severely monochromatic as my dreams, a fan whirling more hot air into my face as I awoke before blinds at half-mast, filtering the urgency of the morning.
I arose each day with the kind of dread that manifests in not surrendering to the unknown. I was always worried about money and my family and the selfish pursuits of writing poetry, which I hid by going on with my post-graduate studies. With research and grants and advisors. With those hours in the library, mostly grateful for the air conditioner, as I poured over dead scholars who lived on through my entrapment, as I quelled whatever lines of verse I would hear sung among the stacks—the real words I wanted to write? Why could I not just let go and speak what sang, what screeched and bellowed and wept, within me?
It wouldn’t last, those long days in the library. I failed. I had to fail even though I knew it would be so much harder without a doctorate, without a home to which I could return.
For how can a wooden decoy floating on the water ever sing of the sublime?
* * *
In the last few years, I’ve heard little about Nahariya in the papers, and yet when I do, it’s often sensational news. There’s the time a longtime resident likened the sleepy coastal city to Chernobyl, and then this year’s report from the Jerusalem Post that Nahariya was the site of a 3,400 Canaanite citadel excavation . Archeologists reported that it was “an administrative center that served the mariners who sailed along the Mediterranean coast.” Within its rooms they found well-preserved weapons, pottery vessels and ceramic figurines which indicated “the extensive commercial and cultural relations that existed at that time with Cyprus and the rest of the lands in the Mediterranean basin.” There was also evidence that revealed the citadel “was destroyed at least four times by an intense conflagration, and each time it was rebuilt.”
What remains of this ancient fortress will not leave Nahariya to join other Canaanite artifacts in the Israel Museum’s current exhibit Pharaoh in Canaan: The Untold Story in Jerusalem, but is slated to be part of “a state of-the-art residence high-rise in the area.” According to the Israel Antiquities Authority, this decision will allow “a solution that would allow the conservation of some of the remains for the benefit of the public.”
That week I spent with Ilana and her parents, I didn’t find any artifacts or traces of a Canaanite fertility goddess that had once famously been found in Nahariya, but I did find several small, triangular cartons floating in the water, with the word Bonjus faded by water damage and sun, and the faded shapes of flavors orange, pineapple, mango. Those are popular drinks in Lebanon, she said. I found all sorts of things floating in the waters of Nahariya: tin cans that had lost their labels; the plastic, bendable arm of a doll; a slash of rubber tire that was partially burnt, its tread well-worn.
Her parents were straight-forward, taciturn people whose collective brow was often furrowed when their daughter spoke to them at dinnertime, the only time we really saw them. Her mother was a nurse, and her father worked in tech; they had made a comfortable home. They retired early to their bedroom, while Ilana and I went outside to enjoy the coastal breeze, nursing glasses of lemonade; her parents weren’t big drinkers to begin with, and they must have gotten rid of the wine they kept for special occasions—or so Ilana suspected. They had both left the house by the time we awoke, and left seemingly small clues of comforts for us: every morning we had fresh towels for both the bath and the beach; money on the table for gas and lunch if we ate out; and for breakfast, a jar of Nescafé and a plate of bagged teas splayed out like a fan; two large bottles of water; chopped salad, a bowl of fresh fruits, and a bag of milk in its plastic pitcher in the fridge; fresh pastries from a nearby bakery tucked into a cloth napkin in a woven basket; a small pan of shakshouka to be reheated—all we had to do was add the eggs.
Ilana shrugged as she lit the gas stove. They’re avoiding me still.
What do you mean? I asked.
They insisted I come home, but they just can’t, she said, cracking an egg hard against the counter.
Can’t what? I asked, but she cracked the egg too hard and it exploded. We watched as its runny insides dripped down the cabinet and onto the floor. I grabbed a sponge, which she took from me. She sighed and wiped her arm against her wet eyes.
Why can’t they forgive me? she asked the floor as she scoured the tiles, rubbing out over and over what the sponge had already taken.
* * *
The week passed quickly. Before returning to Jerusalem, we ventured out to the beach one last time and found the lifeguards had closed it; burning medusas had washed up on the shore. This did not deter Ilana. She hopped the fence, and I followed, at least to the edges of sand where the countless, quivering bodies lay. I felt a strange temptation for the jellyfish, for their multicolored tentacles and crystalline bodies, as I watched Ilana jump between them, as if playing a game of hopscotch.
C’mon, she said. It’s easy.
I stood there, looking at her, at the places she’d cleared.
C’mon, she said. We’ll find a open place in the water.
I looked around again. I think we should go home.
Home? she said and laughed. She turned away from me, and kept going. I watched her, arms straight out at her sides, standing on her tip toes. Even with my sunglasses on, I had to shield my eyes from the sun. Soon she came to a small, clear spot—a sliver of sand—in which she landed, somewhat triumphantly, only to find herself completely surrounded by jellyfish. There was nowhere to go. Meaning she could not go farther. Meaning she had to turn her body back around to go back, and turn very, very carefully, if she were to make it at all. From the back, I could see her shaking, hesitating.
You want to go home, huh? she yelled without turning around.
Yes, I called. Let’s go back.
No, she said.
Ilana.
No, she cried out and then she her hands to her knees, bending down, her long hair falling around bowed head. She seemed to totter slightly, or perhaps it was the sun, when the sun is so powerful it wavers your vision.
Hold on, I called to her, not too loud, not wanting to frighten her, if she might lose her balance.
Stay there, she called, her head still bowed.
I froze, having not even moved yet, as if in awe of the horrors to follow.
Stay there, she said, followed by other words swept up in the wind, by the waves, the sounds of seabirds and distant unrest that was much closer, so much closer, than the blinding sun let slip.
* * *
Something splintered between us, after that trip, and we lost touch. During the winter break that followed, I went with a group of friends to Eilat. I realized it was the southernmost point of Israel, and that less than a year ago, I had been in the country’s northernmost coastal city. Israel is a small country, and it’s easy to forget that at times. In Eilat, we went swimming in a coral reserve, after we warned of sting rays and sea urchins.
No one mentioned, however, the burning coral, which can sting, burn, and imprint its likeness on human skin. One in our party found out the hard way. The burn was like any other burn, and took more than that winter break to heal. I did not see a single jellyfish in Eilat, if memory serves, but I wasn’t really looking for one. When the semester began in autumn, I thought of Ilana and asked a mutual friend, the one who’d thrown the party in which we met, how she was doing. He hadn’t heard in a while, he’d said, but promised to give her a call and check on her for me. I don’t think he did. I didn’t follow-up.
I thought of Ilana again when recently, a friend sent me a video titled “My Surreal Swim with Millions of Jellyfish,” and I watched in alternating states of terror and tranquility. There is something both monstrous and angelic about a bloom of jellyfish, as scientists call a great number of them congregating together. And there is something world-like about that bloom, as if they are microcosms of millions of worlds in which we are given, and fear, but not allowed to understand, the sublime.
I watched it over and over, and thought about their bodies strewn on that beach in Nahariya.
There is something absolutely sublime about jellyfish.
There is something absolutely sublime and free about millions of jellyfish floating in water as if they were traveling through outer space.
That late morning with Ilana on the beach, I feared she’d lose her balance and land back-first into a hoard of jellyfish. I feared she’d slip as she turned around and land face-first into a single jellyfish. I waited there, at the edge of that glistening bloom, for a very long time as her head remained bowed and she spoke to them, whispering of things I couldn’t hear. Then she brought her head up, and straightened her back. With her arms slightly akimbo, she pivoted on her feet until she faced me, faced the spot from which she’d originally jumped. I held my breath, felt the tears rolling down past my sunglasses, as she stretched her leg. I watched as she leaped and landed directly on a glistening globe just outside the spot, as if the jellyfish were a cushion, as if it would soften the fall, the rest of her body falling into the safe space of dusky golden sand. I remember the look on her face, the terror and letting go in her face as she cried out, as if passing through a portal to somewhere new, which was simply somewhere, anywhere, else.