Poem: THERE’S ONLY ONE GOD AND YOU’RE NOT IT
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ShareAll the peoples of all the world degrade one other’s gods but Jews first think your gods do not exist.
An ordinary man,
I go with the gods who
bring me but as the Babylonians drag around Yahweh
I call all concerned to say
we’re going in an entirely different direction, all other gods nothing. And it’s done! You find tons of
ancient Israeli idols until exile, then nearly none. Yahweh marks Israelites
from Canaanites when Israel’s
Canaan.
We’re the un-Canaanites,
mighty, mighty non-Canaanites
and not the Canaanites bleeding other Canaanites for the dough to buy Egyptian protection to bleed Canaanites
for more protection as un-
Canaanites take to hills and caves, wiping out Canaan slowly, though sometimes violently, from within,
part of the larger collapses of
the Mesopotamian ‘n Egyptian empires
bookending Canaan. Canaan’s almost by definition backwater
and the ecological kaleidoscope
between what’s wilderness and settled
naturally selects conditions
for a new egalitarian land reforming ethnic identity.
How sudden’s the swing to Israel? One or two hundred years. Check
archaeological evidence
like palace burn marks
and chopped
monuments, hinting
violent overthrow
in Hazor, more
gradual
power shifts elsewhere.
Are you sure Israel
goes that far back?
Some doubt it,
but it’s hard to ignore
Egyptian
references to
Israelites and Canaan to Israel
continuity in pottery that’s less
fancy but made the same—a big
collective fingerprint—and yet
small pillar-courtyard interconnected
homes linking extended families,
dearth of palaces, and open agricultural planning, show
Canaan
like
Jacob
Israel.
Israelite gods
Canaanite except
the irresistibly populist Yahweh. The guy walks in our courtyard—
El’s intimate identity—
god qua god,
Yahweh is the god, the twin gods peak but he’s the man,
stern yet bubbly, a bit psycho, warm, egalitarian, not about fertility as much as his god pals and concubine—so you need the others.
Still, Yahweh’s for guerrilla, misfit, and dreg,
a new take on god Yahu from Midian, where Moses meets Him and He goes,
“I met Israelites before but they thought I was someone else.” How awkward. If the exodus couldn’t have happened,
it’s still the oldest, most stirring
Hebrew tale, oddly nailing
where they contact Yahweh
cuz that matters more than what might have happened to brave Canaanite slaves, a story you recall cuz easy to forget.
Liberation’s unnatural
so you need soppy miracles.
Proto-Jews are incredibly serious—funny even—
about how they treat one another
but also terrified to be an other—
you come from the other
and could slip back. Classless
agrarian utopia morphs to
monarchy, though King David’s self-made
and the critics who make you feel like crap
about the direction the country is going
still get enshrined
in an oddly secular culture—
ancient Hebrew having no word for “religion”—
so what is
we sway on Yahweh’s sword-
tip major to minor
ev’ry time we say goodbye
there’s such an air of gore
you
doven through it—Hebrew
from the Egyptian “cross”
or “across”
as in Abraham
going through
Canaan from Mesopotamia to Egypt ‘n back to Canaan—
a terminal backwater—
a little like the 2 “cameras” (Mesopotamia and Egypt)
bleeding together on the screen to form 3D— that little slit on the crease of the two projections—
what Hitchcock discovers in the incredible 3D- version of Dial M for Murder is that the slimmest everyday items— a key, for instance— are most likely to reach your face.
Hebrews swing across
the universe since
you can’t erase it,
setting up
synagogue scales absolutely
insecure in major
or minor.
On the one hand there’s the other
hand. And what’s so Yahweh or the ha-way?
Am I ever
monotheist? Hell, I like other gods.
I know God does.
So what’s with the Book
of Judges going “all the
gods of all peoples
of all the nations are NOTHING”?
Plato might
pick up on this gizmo
pulling the rug on the obvious,
giving reason the place of Yahweh over
divine family romance & poetry.
Later, Greek Jews like Philo
of Alexandria translate
iconoclasm and monotheism
onto
one
operational
plane or platform or ground
softening
monotheism,
opening it
a little,
inviting
you in
and centuries and centuries later—now— we want everyone
monotheist so we know they play in our world. If you worship many gods
slobs think you’re a snob,
snobs think you’re a slob
so the Japanese, for instance,
partly to avoid
looking like children, after
Admiral Perry,
prop their emperor to
hide their gods.
You’re okay as long
as you believe in one
god and since
there’s only one god
it has to be the same
God—NOT—but that’s
okay with God who
is also other gods.
Huh? God’s with us, not you—
he works through you,
Cyrus, to take us back to Jerusalem
proving Y---- great,
and that’s when we really toss our idols
‘n go mono because like Captain and Tennille only
one god will keep us together and
buzz in belief already has.
In exile, circumcision becomes big.
People around us aren’t
circumcised and you have to stay Jewish—
a very creative
move since Yahweh’s somehow
able
to move from land and temple to text.
Good luck, Yahweh. I love your new home.
The figure in the text orients us
like Japan opening to the west
reordering itself around the emperor ‘n making him God to show
a face of unified strength to the outside world. They go along to get along. Believing in many gods is okay among themselves but infantile to the West.
The Japanese aren’t monotheist
and neither are we, handy as it is.
One god sweeps the others
in a dustpan and walks away deist-style
so we’re all cool
‘n study what he left.
Computers hang on
God’s trickster
track connecting all computable operations.
Another god can’t come out of nowhere.
The culty Enigma code
changes
every day, but each day monotheism
reasserts itself and
wins World War II.
Monotheism
everything
not only itself,
it’s nice to be a monotheist—
one god, one people, one person—
but God has no friends,
it’s boring without
figure-ground excitement
sustaining on and off again oneness, i.e.,
Jewish
culture,
the pivot every
Westerner
has to make
to the accident-in-reverse
we come from—
the Midian of Deuteronomy—
giving up on teenage
drama for Shakespearian
soliloquy. Who are you talkin’?
Even
Jews go back
cuz they left
something.
Like Odysseus,
Moses returns
not as Moses
but many Moseses,
Moses descending a staircase.
Berlin goes through Jerusalem—Irving Berlin that is cuz what cantors like Berlin’s and Harold Arlen’s dads sing really does go way back back back to ancient Israel.
“In his constant shifting from major to minor keys”
Cole Porter “consciously wrote Jewish melodies (191),”
says Jack Gottlieb in his Smithstonian book.
Richard Rodgers and Yip Harburg are surprisingly
intent on Porter admitting his Jewish debt
though Porter makes no secret Irving Berlin’s his man—
Berlin writes words and music too. Rodgers writes music
so Jerome Kern’s his avatar.
Berlin looks up to George M. Cohan so
it’s not ALL about being Jewish—
No! Cohan’s not Jewish of course
though a friend thought he was
so I had to look it up and his wife was partly Jewish, but I never say it is about being Jewish, just hard to avoid and
radical as in a root of much
culture, art, and poetry.
Yahweh’s the top,
but I’m a flop of
infinite grammatical equivalences,
and Rodgers
feels Porter
hides too much,
singling out “Night and Day,”
“Begin the Beguine,” “Love for Sale,”
“I Love Paris,” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”
as Porter’s greatest and most Jewish pieces.
Harburg and Rodgers report what Cole tells them
to prove how consciously Cole adapts
Yiddish and East European
synagogue tonal shifts and syncopations.
Porter says he needs to base his
music on that music
to write his version of this fine
and elegant
new American music.
I don’t know anything about music
but feel God’s favorite poetry
is fine and elegant, and
before it ever occurs to me
Jerome Kern might
be Jewish
I can’t get over
how songs don’t
sound like songs
before him, but
the divide’s Berlin’s
1911’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” "the first
real American musical work,” raves George
Gershwin. Porter’s labeled the great non-Jewish American
songbook writer—but what about Johnny
Mercer?—though he’s younger and collaborates
so much with Arlen and other Jewish
songwriters, but there are other brilliant
non-Jewish twenties and thirties
songwriters such as Ellington
and a plethora of other African Americans,
yet I hear what riles Rodgers and Harburg.
Not only does Jewish culture influence popular music,
it makes it what it is, a jazzier
take on the pogo,
dovening
as you glide.
It might be a one-god world
but Jewish culture’s always shifting
from minor to major to
minor to major
before you can crack the code of wherever the hell you are.
When the 19th century empire of poetic form
disintegrates,
poets emigrate to Whitman—
Irving Berlin and Cole Porter in one—
or really Whitman is Moses—
as important as it is
to Freud that Moses be Egyptian not
Jewish since Freudian Moses needs
a good murdering
to be mourned, celebrated, eaten,
and postdated in
new Jewish ways.
Before the temple burns,
the ten commandments
are found miraculously in temple archives making Josiah cry at what a bad ass
Moses—Deuteronomy Moses—is. He knows way back many strange gods will fuck us, says Josiah and when the temple smokes
Moses is reborn.
Similarly, poets Whitman
inspires right
off don’t carry Whitman to us.
His greatest influence is indirect.
He needs to be ignored before permeating
poetry.
Through Whitman
biblical forms spread—
just talking, or anyway talking
in Yahweh’s most intimate
public address,
exquisitely makeshift
grammatically parallel improv,
syncopated logos
pulling
rabbis out of the text,
neurotically close-
to-the-vest
redistributions of relaxed
poetic emphases—
hallmarks of
how Jews succeed in modern poetry
without even being there.
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