The piety of difference

The vastness of a memory’s sky, comforting in its infinite distance from the present, bathed in the beige foam that washes all my dreams. And what is it that evades me in each and every one? Myself, myself, I have never found myself. But then, I was never there. That which is dreamt is a slice of 80s Americana, a neon Hollywood Americana, a childhood memory that passes through golden fields of wheat lit by a sepia sun, where the colours of the air are made up of brown, yellow and a sandy blue, just as much as it passes through the rocky, dry baking roads of Israel and the lone flowers blooming in the desert’s oven air. For even my memories of Israel are not real and seem more informed by the image of Israel as sold to me through television and films than by my own experiences. Could life in the north have been like those movies? Eilat must’ve been a very different place to the rest of the country. And is there not a part of me that for this reason feels that I have not had a true experience of Israel? Rather than feel as though I have had a unique experience, growing up in a unique place among the various places of the world (not more special, just different, just as every place has some difference about it, small though it may be), I feel as though lacking before a genuine experience of Israel. Let it be said that difference is not a given. Everywhere is the desire for sameness – a reactive desire, yes, Deleuze and Nietzsche did not overlook this. This desire dictates my memory, the construction of my own narrative. For if, in spite of his brilliance, Deleuze took comfort in the fact that difference is in everything and saw in it a testament of the world’s eternal salvation and source of hope, then he was but a false prophet and a priest. He may not have been any better than the modernists. Deleuze may not have believed in the idea of dialectic resolution, but he did away with it only at the expense of his own integrity: he did not need to believe in a final resolution because he substituted for it the belief that salvation is already here, happening at every moment, in every human being and in every thought. Yet the truth of difference does not preclude the danger that the Same is forever winning, forever has the upper hand, and that we have not yet even begun to see the horrible potential of The Same and the great degradation to which it can lead.