by Michael Berk · 07/06/10
For almost two decades, composer, vocalist, and installation artist Jewlia Eisenberg has been making music rooted in the sounds of the Jewish and African diasporas. Eisenberg’s recordings with the ensemble Charming Hostess, based on her wide-ranging reading, have explored Walter Benjamin’s Berlin, Asja Lacis’s Moscow, and Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Sarajevo, while her research has taken her across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Her latest work, the Bowls Project, takes her to Babylon; the forthcoming Gramophone and Dynamo explores the rebetika music of Salonika, while a project still in the planning stages will visit the texts of Natalia Ginzburg.
The Bowls Project, which premieres at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 6, explores the tradition of the “demon bowls” that were buried, upside down, beneath the thresholds of homes in Bablyon during the 2nd through 6th centuries to protect families, children, and possessions against evil. The texts inscribed on these bowls—expressions of what the composer calls the “apocalyptic intimate”—invoke the powers of angels and demons in the service of everyday domestic struggles. The bowls—many of which have been unearthed by ordnance during the Iraq war—remain the only written record we have of women’s voices during the time of the Talmud.
The Bowls Project, including Eisenberg’s settings of the bowls’ texts to new music influenced by American folk and Babylonian traditions, is an immersive multimedia installation presented in a domed space designed by Michael H. Ramage, engineer of last year’s World Architecture Festival Building of the Year, and built by a group of volunteers using the nearly lost art of timbrel vaulting, taking advantage the strength of tile to build elegant arches without the need for extensive support. Within the domes, visitors are invited to record their own “secrets of the home,” which will then be played back as part of an evolving sound collage. In addition, Charming Hostess will perform weekly; rituals from a variety of traditions will take place on Friday evenings, and other participatory programs, including workshops on the bowls texts and amulet making, will be held on weekends.
Habitus caught up with Eisenberg by phone from her home in San Francisco, where she’s readying the project for its opening today. You can see images or video of the construction of the domes, or participate by sharing your own secrets. To learn more about the bowls themselves, download Dan Levene’s pamphlet on their history.
Tell me about what you’re calling the “apocalyptic intimate.”
There’s this idea in the texts of the bowls that the most great forces—angels and demons, the messengers of the divine—are things that people encounter every day. It’s not really your choice whether you deal with them, they’re just around. The bowls often refer to these wild, giant forces, these apocalyptic visions, in intense combination with domestic issues: “I bar thee now, from gossiping, with the twelve names of twelves sons.”
These are very different registers from our perspective…
But on the other hand, they aren’t. There’s all of this American music that we love that’s in conversation with these same kinds of ideas. “Get back devil, leave me alone,” all of the stuff about angels and demons that’s very present in American folk music, both black and white. I think these are deep tropes for people in any case, and there’s a relationship here between these kinds of texts, although they’re very remote, obviously.
And that’s the connection that informs the music you’ve written for the project?
The music for the project draws pretty heavily on the Bablyonian Jewish music tradition—some religious songs, but also some pop music from the 1940s, and then this American folk music that comes out of an apocalyptic tradition. I think it sounds pretty straightforwardly like my writing voice; I guess there’s a bit more single-voice singing than in the past.
Does that have to do with the notion of intimacy?
Well, what would happen is that you’d get a woman client, she’d go to the scribe and he (I’m assuming most of them were he) would inscribe the bowl, she’d take it home and bury it under the doorway of her house. It was probably never ever said out loud. You really feel it as the voice of a single person—it’s not about a city, not about a movement. It’s also very universal and you identify with these people—an Iraqi woman from 1,500 years ago is worried about the same things as me—and that is so obvious when you experience these texts, even though they’re so weird.
What about Jewishness? Are these a Jewish form?
You can read this through a Jewish lens, but the bowls are cosmopolitan—everyone has them at this time, in Babylon around 1,500 years ago, from the 2nd to the 6th century. Mandaeans, Jews, Syriac Christians, Zoroastrians, animists. Everyone is using the same amulet system. Not only is it a cosmopolitan form—everyone shares it—but it’s a porous form. A Zoroastrian might go to a Jewish scribe, and that would be totally normal. You get a lot of flow between gods, goddesses, angels, demons. For example, you’ll see on a Jewish bowl, “And I come to him for the satisfaction of love, with the angel Dalibat”—but Dalibat is not a Jewish angel. She’s a Mesopotamian goddess, related to Ishtar. But here she appears as part of the Jewish spirit world. And that’s something of interest to me—that porosity, that cosmopolitanism.
“Four blast demons came forth into the fortress of the earth, and the devil horns sounded and the rebel drums pounded, and the queen Lilith moaned and Leviathan the sea monster shrieked. I abjure you, great bird of rivers. Listen to my plea and accept my incantation.” The great bird of rivers? That’s a Jewish god? “Bodies of motion, bodies of chaos and tummult. The voice. The sound of bodies of noise, chaos and noise.” And you see what I mean by apocalyptic? They sound like Black Sabbath.
Also with the bowls, mysticism and spirituality and sexuality are very deeply intertwined. You get a surprising number of women’s voices in the bowls. I was talking to Daniel Boyarin about the bowls, and I had asked him to read some of the Aramaic for me, so I could sing it correctly and he stumbled over a word…and I wondered, what word could he possibly stumble over? It was the “we” form for “women.” It never appears once in the Talmud, but constantly in the bowls, where you have tons and tons of women’s words: I want to fuck the guy next door, I want to protect my kids or my possessions, or to stop these people gossiping about me. A really common trope in the bowls is that a demon has come into the house and married somebody nonconsensually, and you have to get a formal divorce or it’ll keep hanging around.
And the texts of the bowls are the only represented women’s voices from that period?
It was not weird for women to express themselves, even though the canonical text we have from that time has none of it. Women don’t have a voice. You do have some women in the Talmud, Beruriah for instance, but their words are written down by men. The bowls are still mediated—we assume the scribes who wrote these words down were men—but you really do get a sense of these individual women.
Was there an official, legal aspect to the bowls? Were the scribes who wrote the texts representatives of the state?
No, these guys were not rabbis, though we don’t actually know a huge amount about them. One thing that’s interesting—there are more Jewish bowls than there were Jews at this time; you see a lot of bowls written in Jewish Aramaic, but the names are not Jewish. They think that at the time Jews were considered to have more mojo, to be more magical than other people, so you might go seek out a Jewish scribe to get your bowl done. But this is a time when Jews are just one of a number of people living around there. You can see how everyone’s sharing the same magic system.
People who are into early Kabbalah are interested in the bowls, because this is the first time you get the language that becomes part of the slightly later, seminal mystical texts.But what’s interesting is that this is all happening at the same time as the Talmud. The Talmud ends up being the mainstream, and the language of the bowls is now totally marginal and weird sounding. But at the time, the Talmud was just some guys sitting in a room, and these people were mainstream. Everybody had this.
Given that you make a connection with American folk traditions, is apocalyptic intimacy necessarily a diaspora concept?
You might think of it as a female concept. For me diaspora means that you’re looking at something without a land base. It’s anti-nationalist. In what way is the bowls project a diaspora project? It’s super anti-nationalist; it has to do with this cosmopolitan, porous form. And it’s also a critique of the war in and occupation of Iraq. Because that’s why I started it and that’s what I got interested in. It’s either a place of war, or a place of myth. Sumer and cuneiform, or Fallujah. That’s what we know. And this is something different and it’s something that I felt that people could connect to. I really wanted to kick aside the myths.
If you conflate diaspora stuff with Jewish stuff, or with African stuff, you get into a lot of conversations about text as home, language as home, multiplicity as home, and I identify with all of those ideas, but I really didn’t want to get into the Sumerian civilization. This is about some women in this place, not about civilization, not about giant movements but intimate relations.
Instead of thinking of it as a physical displacement, which is the way we’d normally think about diaspora, there’s a sense of questioning your spiritual space. And that might involve how you encounter angels and demons. If you think about Freud and the idea of something being unheimlich, unhomelike, uncanny, it’s something that is not of ours, and that’s what the supernatural is —- something that’s beyond the home.
But the bowls are pretty radically of the home…
Yeah, exactly. This is the opposite of that Western, that German idea. You’re saying that something that’s very deep in my home, and central to my domestic preoccupations, is also radically far from my home. And I can encounter those entities, and I have to, and there’s something that will help me mediate that relationship, these encounters with these things that are radically unhomelike. And you see that in the bowls texts and in American folk music.
The words themselves are performative. The words themselves have power, they do something. You both coerce and cajole these entities into doing what you want them to do, with words. We don’t have that many performative words that we take very seriously. For example, one that’s pretty big in the state of California right now is “I now pronounce you man and wife” or “I now pronounce you partners for life.” That word is law, it changes the status of living people, just those words.
One of the American songs that I chose for the record, “Hangman Devil Man”—and this is one of the only ones—is about the idea that the Devil Man is kind of an agent of the state, the hangman who’s going to take you down, but most of them have to do with intimate relations, with angels and demons being very personal, being in your life.
Getting deep into these texts one of the things you have to deal with is the Lilith story and how women encounter female power—physical power, spiritual power, their own power, the power of other women. So all these questions about how political it is—maybe it’s the Muriel Rukeyser thing about how if one woman told the truth about her life the whole world would burst?
Is there a place for the apocalyptic intimate in contemporary life? How do you see it working?
Let me give you an example. I had a residency at the University of Denver last year, and my partner’s sister is a fundamentalist, in one of the big megachurches there. And she loves music. So I was telling her about the project, and she says to me that it sounds amazing, and she’d love to come hear it, but she can’t, because I’m using the words of demons, and I could invoke a demon and she can’t be there while that’s happening.
The apocalyptic intimate is part of her daily life. When I say I want to pray on something, I’m not even sure if I encounter it in the same way she does. Do I think that an angel is with me all the time, or that if something is wrong with my house it’s because there’s a demon here? That’s not how I would articulate my own life, but that is part of her life.
I’m a believer; I pray, we keep Shabbat, for this installation I can’t work on Friday night. Is that encountering the apocalyptic intimate? I don’t know. It’s a different articulation.
The people of the bowls, who knows what they believed? But in any case they were comfortable talking to the divine. Expressing themselves toward the holy, toward the source of all being? No problem! They don’t feel uncomfortable about that, or awkward, or dorky. It’s not weird for them.
Or is it even separate at all from their everyday lives?
For me, one thing I really like about them is that there’s no self-consciousness about getting right with God. And I feel like that too. I talk to God every day.
True or false: “there has ever been a source of great tension between Judaism and democracy.” See what Habitus advisor Ian Buruma has to say about it, in this fascinating interview with Farid Boussaid and Jonothan Gharraie. Author of more than a dozen books on a dizzying array of topics, Buruma’s most recent English-language work is The Taming of the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. In it, Buruma focuses on the complex relations between religion, liberalism, secularism, and democracy in America, Asia, and Europe.
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