“The Cult of Nothing and Art as it Must Be”

What is art?

So asks the broker of Yiddish literature, who plays with artistic acts in his dead-tired, blackened exchange of literature-culture-scrap-waste paper values. A new broker comes to this poetry-establishment literature-market, he goes to his gigantic wagon of hay, he plucks out a strand of hay, gives it a twirl in his hand, gives an opinion and asks a question for the thousand-millionth time:

‘Well, what is art?’

And he decides, ‘art is…’ and continues. Nevermind that art is not everything!
To him, however, the proper artist, it completely does not matter what art is. It concerns him what art must be, what art needs to be, what art will be. The opinion-cryer and stamp-placer shall say:

‘Nice. I am prepared to assume that you, art-clerk, are just, and your trial is just, and your art is just, and what you have decided in your great nearsightedness, that this is art– is really the true, true art itself, as it goes and as it stands and as it art-ifies. But if so, then why should art, a custom, not break necks? Who needs such misfortune? If that is art, should one not create a different art into one’s life, an art with a different face, different eyes, different speech, art from tomorrow, from the day after tomorrow, from the day after that? Anything but that art, anything but that!’

— Aaron Zeitlin, “Der kult fun gornisht un di kunst vi zi darf zayn” (Varshever shriftn, 1927)

So begins Aaron Zeitlin’s kabbalistic modernist poetic manifesto, which lies beneath the inspired title “The Cult of Nothing and Art as it Must Be.” Aaron Zeitlin was the son of noted Hasidic intellectual Hillel Zeitlin, although both are relatively obscure figures today. Aaron Zeitlin is of particular fascination to me because he is one of the only Yiddish poets to write explicitly about Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism in his work. Kabbalah, being an advanced religious topic written and studied in Hebrew and Aramaic, seems far afield from the concerns of modern Yiddish poets who were interested in transforming and transgressing tradition, breaking ties to the mythologized shtetl and finding their works’ landing place in the new world of New York and North America.

So it is very notable that Zeitlin wrote this manifesto in Yiddish about how to write kabbalistic poetry. In line with this introductory scene, where he characterizes the brokers of Yiddish literature as self-aggrandizing, petty clerks, he rails against the expectations placed upon writers in Yiddish or any language–most of all, the expectation of clarity. Why should art be clear? Why should art be clear when life and experience are not? As Zeitlin writes in this essay, “nothing has ever happened in my life–or, I think, in the lives of others–that does not make one bang their head on the door of the unknown, and whose last line is not located in the domain of other illogical borders.” In this sentence–which itself shows no obligation to clarity–Zeitlin claims that nothing ever happens which is clear, nothing ever happens which doesn’t press up against the absolute limits of understanding. Spoken like a true kabbalist.

This way of thinking is mystical in many of the ways I have discussed before in this newsletter. Apophasis, or “unsaying,” is a rhetoric that can be found across mystical traditions wherein God is only referenced in terms of what God is not. Another kernel of mystical thought is the belief that what we see is not what really is, that the “real” is located in transcendence rather than any objects we could meaningfully interact with. Rather, kabbalists hold that the yesh, existence as we know it and everything we perceive to exist, is all a concealment over the eyn, the nothingness, the non-existence which is the essential nature of all things. Part of being a holy, righteous person is recognizing the nothingness at the center of all things, recognizing that their appearance is illusion, and thus exalting the sparks of divinity which ache to be returned to their source in non-existence. Accordingly, as Zeitlin writes, everything we could possibly experience is really making us bang our head against the wall of that thing we cannot understand. 

He then continues by saying that art can go one of two ways: either 1.) the “art of the idea,” which stays still at the door of understanding, and 2.) “the revealed visions,” “art of seeing.” “Everything else,” writes Zeitlin, is “literature by literary people for literary people,” “kunst-shmunst” (Yiddish for “art-shmart.”)

Zeitlin’s language, even in the short passage I included above, is dense and very difficult to understand. Kabbalists tend to write in intricate, complicated ways, making references that can’t necessarily be explained. This is what happens to language when a writer is honest with themselves that they are banging their head on the door of the unknown, pushing up against the limits of understanding.

Clarity is an unreasonable, indeed hypocritical expectation to place on writing that is honest about the mystical nature of experience. Zeitlin writes that “clarity is the mask of an unknown face.” Indeed, for a kabbalist, all things we see are a mask for something else, but claiming or attempting to be transparent is even worse, because it conceals the very fact of being masked. 

Zeitlin makes this kabbalistic first principle into a principle of artmaking and using language in the modern, secular context. The methods by which kabbalistic truths appear in language, in Hebrew or Aramaic in the sacred texts, also applies to a Yiddish writer in the 20th century, speaking to a literary audience. 

How this relates to work by other modern Yiddish writers, who were not explicitly interested in Kabbalah, is a topic for another time. For now, though, I conclude with the observation that not all good writing is clear to us, nor should it be. Indeed, I think we should all consider Zeitlin’s observation that clarity is the real deceit.