Running Is a Sip of the Nectar of the Gods, the Cathedral of Sweat, Pain and Pleasure
In his new book of poems, Ya'kir Ben Moshe, a poet, editor, marathon runner and director of Beit Bialik in Tel Aviv, has a funny poem about secret quarrels taking place on the bookshelf. “Goldberg is unwilling to be next to Dan Miron, Shtoklis has a hard time with Primo Levi, Borges refuses to say what he dreams about, Houellebecq does not want to snuggle with Agnon anymore, he drives him crazy, Churchill smells of old age, and everyone complains that the haiku poets talk in their sleep,” and so on. Writers’ troubles. “One morning I did not do any sport, I sat with my coffee, looked at the shelf and it seemed to me that they were having a party while we were asleep,” Ben Moshe says. It seems that this metaphorical party is also taking place in his real life, for more than 25 years now, as the editor of literary events at Beit Bialik. “I have done more than a thousand events so far. The launch of ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ with Amos Oz was with us, Dahlia Ravikovitch was with us, Haim Gouri, everyone. Aharon Amir once told me that ‘Beit Bialik is the beating heart of Hebrew literature.’ We are usually booked a year in advance. Some writers call me while they are writing and say, ‘I am in the penultimate chapter, I am submitting the book in a month and it will be published in three months, save me a place in the spring.’ That also includes telling people no, I have said no many times. Once I received a letter from a lawyer asking why I had refused to hold an event for a certain poet, and I had to write a justification letter explaining why his book was not good.” Ben Moshe, 52, was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in Givatayim. He is married and the father of two, and also the nephew of poet Roni Someck. He began publishing poems in the late 1990s. “Stretching the Morning Arteries” (Hakibbutz Hameuchad), his sixth poetry book, is a mature book that holds on to all the ends of his existence, the body and sport, fatherhood, partnership, home, and the home made of words. The poems describe the life of a cyclist and marathon runner, the body and its manifestations, his teenage son stretching out syllables, sitting on a bench in Gan Meir with the woman he has been married to for years, the lonely life of the poet. The marathon runner is built from a generous dose of stupidity, like anyone who takes sport seriously, and a love of solitude. It is not about running fast, but about running right, patience, lingering in things.” Is the commitment to sport the result of a midlife crisis? “I am 52, I started cycling at 47 because of the coronavirus. Everyone wanted to go abroad after the first lockdown, I got on a bicycle. In a midlife crisis, some people go on ocean voyages, do a doctorate, leave their wife, murder their children. Bialik came to the Land of Israel at 50, you have to do something. Out of that nothing I discovered the being, the body.”
“I’m afraid I cycle more than I run” What are you more, a runner or a cyclist? “That is a question that occupies me all the time. Unfortunately, I cycle more, three bike workouts a week and only two runs a week. When I cycle I am always jealous of those running next to me. Running is the holy grail, it is a sip of the nectar of the gods, because it is only the body, without accessories, without carbon, without wheels. The cathedral of sweat, of bones, tissues, pain, pleasure, levitation, landing, 100 percent body. Bicycles are a more social setup, you are in the peloton, you only see the wheel of the person in front of you, not the view. You are constantly occupied with the dynamics of the wind, talking to people. Bicycles are a place of open eyes, running is a place of closed eyes.”
You have already run 47 kilometers, more than a marathon. What materials is a marathon runner made of? “A generous dose of stupidity, like anyone who does sport seriously. And you love being alone, in a marathon you are alone. It is not about running fast but about running right, patience, enjoying that frequency, lingering in things. A marathon is a long-term marriage, it is life.” Running has entered literature, Haruki Murakami wrote a book about it, and in Israel Yiftach Alony did it. “True, but they did not write poetry. When I came to write the poems in the book I felt that I was creating a new language, as happened when I wrote about children being born, there were two languages, the language of parenthood and the language of poetry about parenthood. That is how there is the language of running and the language of writing about running. I did not know how to write poems about sport, how to write sweat, landscape, speed.” My children do not read poetry at all, certainly not my poems. It is terrible to read your parents’ poems, you do not want to discover that your father is a human being. God forbid they read me.”
The second part of the book is written in long lines like prose and is about home. Do your children read your poems? “Absolutely not. They do not read poetry at all, certainly not my poems. It is a terrible thing to read your parents’ poems, because you do not want to discover that your father is a human being. God forbid they read my poems. In my previous book too, ‘Whistle of the Night Watchman,’ almost all the poems were in prose and dealt with children. I could not shorten the lines, not create spaces, not even use metaphors, I felt that family routine was a living organism. I wanted to give both the dust and dirt and the flowers and angels. This is not glittering poetry, but a dusty window, and as such it must be real.”
“Music has accompanied me all my life” In the poem “The Poet,” dedicated to Nathan Zach, you describe poetry as a kind of distant and empty horizon that the poet walks through in his loneliness, and the reader too. “I knew Nathan Zach. Once he called me drunk and said that if Sarah, his partner, did not come back to him, he would transfer all his signed books by Else Lasker-Schüler, a German Jewish poet who became famous in the early 20th century, to me. He seemed to me a lonely man and it was evident in his poetry.” And do you feel alone? “In general I feel that way too, but I have a companion who has accompanied me all my life, music. As a teenager I would not have survived without it. I am constantly listening to music, it gives me a hand, crosses the street with me.” Are you troubled by the government’s conduct, which is canceling prizes and budgets? “Our main supporter is the Tel Aviv municipality, it is a city budget from the culture department. The Ministry of Culture gives additional money for literary events and we rely on it a lot. My fear is greater, what is happening to the country, to the state of literature, to people, to creators. The cultural situation is not good. In my view we are the last generation that reads and writes, in the future AI will take the place of creation and it will become more sophisticated. Beyond that, people are busy making a living, reading a book is a luxury. People watch television, are addicted to social networks, humanism is weakening, tolerance toward the other, language is shrinking.”
Cultural icons have also changed. “Once the cultural icons were Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Amir Gutfreund, there was a great deal of energy in literature. Maybe we need to wait for vintage, after AI they will return to records, to squeaks, to stammers, to printing errors, to humanity, to stumbling, to the ant on the back of the mountain. In the end, it will remain after us.”
