I might have to invest a few mornings to read Etgar Keret’s newest collection of short stories. It may be directly related to what I’ve reading and thinking about for the last year.

A transcript of one intriguing bookstagram outburst, probably AI-generated:

The uncanny background of “Bubbler”, never fully explained, is the pervasive presence of a secretive and perhaps not fully benevolent cult that has come to believe that the bulk of a person’s life is spent wandering about in a sort of parallel universe, more real than the universe we inhabit. This parallel universe is lived in a category of consciousness entirely outside of waking or sleep. This state is far from unconscious, but inaccessible to consciousness and memory. According to the cult, how a person conducts themselves in this parallel universe determines the mood and themes of that person’s waking hours and the fragments of dreams they can recall. The obtrusive and, as we will see, quite distressing public rituals of the cult are claimed to improve life in the putative “real world” enjoyed by adepts.

Or maybe I’ll skip reading the story, and avoid purchasing yet another bulky and costly book, and for once settle for the review of the story. With both fiction and business writing, I find I get more than what I need from the writing about the writing.

It is probably no accident that an Israeli author (even a secular one) would weave such Kabbalistic (or Kabbaloidal?) ideas into absurdist short stories.

It brings a passage from Scholem to mind, and makes me wonder if Keret ever read it:

It is generally believed that the attitude of mysticism toward history is one of aloofness, or even of contempt. The historical aspects of religion have a meaning for the mystic chiefly as symbols of acts which he conceives as being divorced from time, or constantly repeated in the soul of every man. Thus the exodus from Egypt, the fundamental event of our history, cannot, according to the mystic, have come to pass once only and in one place; it must correspond to an event which takes place in ourselves, an exodus from an inner Egypt in which we all are slaves. Only thus conceived does the Exodus cease to be an object of learning and acquire the dignity of immediate religious experience. In the same way, it will be remembered, the doctrine of “Christ in us” acquired so great an importance for the mystics of Christianity that the historical Jesus of Nazareth was quite often relegated to the background. If, however, the Absolute which the mystic seeks is not to be found in the varying occurrences of history, the conclusion suggests itself that it must either precede the course of mundane history or reveal itself at the end of time. In other words, knowledge both of the primary facts of creation and of its end, of eschatological salvation and bliss, can acquire a mystical significance.

“The Mystic,” says Charles Bennett in a penetrating essay,” “as it were forestalls the processes of history by anticipating in his own life the enjoyment of the last age.” This eschatological nature of mystical knowledge becomes of paramount importance in the writings of many Jewish mystics…

In a way, “Bubbler” provides a real, if extremely silly, theory of how “time” preceding and anteceding time might transpire within a lifetime.

And now that I think about it, this also reminds me of an obscure little meditation I wrote on the conspicuous presence of oblivion in meditation. I’m probably just making up connections that aren’t there, but now I can tell I’m going to have to buy this book. I guess I’ll have to move something to storage to make room on my limited shelf space for another book, that no doubt will also end up in storage.