January 2, 2017
“Just see your servant’s suffering and misery. Just see his soul, a vulture in a trap.”
This self- description by Ibn Gabriel, one of the ancestors of Hebrew poetry, fits not just himself but really all the disenfranchised people I can think of. Just see your neighbor’s suffering and misery, your refugee’s, your homeless person’s. They might not appeal to a higher power, as Ibn Gabriel did, for enlightenment. They might just long for safety, a place to be, a meal to share to escape their cage. The Jewish poet, by the way, living a short and arduous life, with anger issues and a love for the grotesque, derived his quest for knowledge and philosophy from the Arab world that he lived in.
“The large-scale absorption of cosmopolitan ideas and intellectual pursuits by Jewish intellectuals and religious leaders was one of the developments in Jewish culture that was made possible by the spread of Islam throughout the Mediterranean world. By the mid-tenth century, most of world Jewry lived in Islamic domains and spoke Arabic as their native language. Through Arabic, Jews had access to the high culture of the age, including, on the one hand, the metaphysics, medicine, astronomy, logic, and mathematics inherited from the Greeks.”
Or so I learn from an introduction to his works here: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/219518/vulture-in-a-cage?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=db7edbd121-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-db7edbd121-207667521
I strongly believe that art sets that vulture free from his cage, and never more so when done in solidarity and with a shared mission. Below is the perfect example. Why the title talks about vulnerability is a mystery to me. All I learned from that short clip was about the strength of a community whose soul did soar.
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/511085/when-art-becomes-an-exercise-in-vulnerability/
(Photographs from the Austin Tx Kite Festival)
