I’m in Arizona, Wilson. Heading to California here shortly. My blog is a mess. I had taken a breather from poetry and philosophical essays to write da series of posts about my trip to Israel, thinking I would either enter the country easily or after some fighting, and I’d hoped that my writing to you would form some material that would prove to be something of a sequel to the Electrochemical Girl book, but things didn’t turn out as I’d planned.
I ended up going so crazy that I would have been out of my mind had I ended up in Israel, and with no one in that country who gave enough of a crap eabout me that I’d feel comfortable dumpring myself on their doorstep, I just br oke it off in order to go to Zack Snyder’s #FullCircle Snydercon for mental health awareness…which I didn’t make it to…after making a #FullCircle around the planet earth…as a dude with mental health problems…because I was just so jacked up…
So the intent was to go to the actual gates of Israel and ask various Israeli entities, the Times of Israel, an immigration lawyer, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Knesset of Israel, if I could work for them, volunteer for them, or help them in any way that I could if they’d sponsor me to come into the country somehow. I’d get a sense of who in Israel loves and cares for the traveller and the stranger.
No dice. Nobody helped. The closed doors were bizarre beyond compare, with people not answering work phones, lawyers charging $5,000 for what one would expect would cost $500, and, well, you know the story, Wilson, and you can read the posts again if you’ve forgotten anything.
In case this might look like I am lambasting Israelis or Jews or something, I can’t fail to point out that I also asked a foreign Christian organization operating in Israel about volunteering for them, and that didn’t work out either.
In all these cases, what should have been easy wasn’t. People answered the phone or responded to e-mails weeks later, if at all, and often after considerable urging. And then there was the absolutely bizarre failure of the internet or electronic devices failing at every turn, not to mention shockingly bizarre behavior from the apps I was using and the people I was interacting with online.
Ultimately I left when it looked like I couldn’t do any more and like California would be the next place to go. I didn’t call in every chip I could have, though. I only made contact with one “friend,” a female, Liat, who treated me so bizarrely I seriously wondered if she were an AI chatbot designed to drive me crazy. I didn’t ask anyone else for help because I had planned to ask strangers for help before friends, and because those I knew seemed so busy, and none of them were really good enough friends to ask them to go to bat for me. I don’t know, Wilson, if I hadn’t started losing my mind, things may have turned out differently.
Concerning strangers, though, I only made it to the second-to-last person on the list. You also know that I’d been becoming more and more entangled with Zack Snyder fanbase during the trip. There is an Israeli in that crew. Gal Gadot. Wonder Woman.
I’d planned to make contact with her or someone connected to her to see if I could somehow hop on some wing of whatever entourage she may have and get into Israel and learn the language and somehow integrate myself into Israeli film and media in the country.
The idea was that if the Hebrew University hooked me up, I’d concentrate on academic stuff. If the Times of Israel hired me, I’d get into journalism, etc. I’d let my contacts in the country determine exactly how I would accomplish my mission. Coming on board with actors and filmmakers would, of course, funnel me into that activity.
Now I hadn’t been developing any particularly romanticized aspirations about Gal and Israeli film like I had been having about Zack and the fans and the Justice League trilogy/quintet, although Gal’s Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, along with director David Ayer, formed the crew of what we call “the Snyderverse,” and Gal played Wonder Woman in two of Zack’s movies.
Further, the first Wonder Woman movie was about the heroism of sacrificing oneself for the undeserving, a significant New Testament message, and the second movie was about the importance of accepting truth rather than living in fantasy. This is a powerful theistic message in general.
So while Patty and Gal and Wonder Woman were not at the center of what I was thinking about with all of the drama surrounding those films, they certainly were not unrelated to my fascination with the spiritual underpinnings of this set of superhero movies containing biblical themes produced by a group of Hollywooders who just weren’t theistic biblical theologians.
When I got to Aqaba, I actually wrote an e-mail to Gal’s agent at William Morris Endeavor in New York saying that I was a fan and I was coming to Israel, and that I was wanting to do a documentary about the whole Snyderverse phenomenon. I actually did, and I actually still do. It was a bit wordy, a half dozen paragraphs, but no novel. I said in closing that I would be following the mail with a call shortly. No one responded to it. On the one hand, it could have been the Marvel parademon AI bot trolls from Satan that prevented the electronic communication. A lot of that was going on at that time. Or it could have been that I said I would be calling shortly. It was, after all, a fan mail that should have been followed by a call if it were actually something serious.
However, I got tuned away at the border, and a giant white rabbit named Frank jumped out of the movie Donne Darko, put a collar on me, and dragged me to Alice’s wonderland of Jungian psychological collapse. I didn’t follow through with Gal Gadot’s agent. I thought I’d reestablish some kind of contact once I figured out what the hell was going on. I never did. I’m still figuring out what the hell was going on.
Then in Jordan the promotion of the Snydercon started ramping up, and pictures of Wonder Woman started showing up…and jumping out at me. She actually provided the slogan for the convention.
Well, I am back in the world of the familiar, Wilson. Not sure how transformed I am. I feel like I’ve had to return quite a bit to “the old me” in order to return to sanity and adulthood. We will see the changes over time, I guess. At any rate, the picture above was just one of several impacting me.
The fact that she is Israeli and connected to the Snyderverse puts her into the two things I seem to have going on in my life. I made a couple of posts about this on Zack’s Vero page.
You can tell one foot was already off the deep end, right? I’m thinking I was writing those from the Battuta Hostel in Amman. The other foot would be going off the deep end about two weeks later, if I remember correctly. This is right before the Tinder app started trying to fix me up with everyone in Finland and Mongolia.
Now also around that time, spending quite a bit of time on social media, particularly the Reddit, I ended up doing a bit of arguing wth some misandronist women in one of their groups where they were posting pictures of stupid things men said online to complain about. Of course I would go in there with a certain understanding of the male point of view, so I would usually get thrashed and downvoted to oblivion by the lovely ladies.
At one point I was trying to demonstrate that their baseless hatred of patriarchy stemmed from an inability to devote onesself to their partner. They had been raging about the concept of a dowry being tantamount to purchase of a slave. I made an attempt to reference the concept of a devoted male servant to a female of superior station with an illustration of the dedication of a champion servant knight to his queen. In proferring this illustration, I decided to interject Gal Gadot. I’ll reproduce my comment below:
I would be absolutely thrilled if some exquisite queen would buy me and make me her champion. Take Wonder Woman for example. Gal Gadot. If she were to put fifty shekels on a table, she could own me. I would carry rifle and sword in her service. I would protect her from all harm. I would turn armies to dust for whispering against her. I would bring her and Yaron tea in the morning. Nothing would make me happier than to be her warrior slave. I would delight to be her gladiator servant.
Yeah, I was trying to make the point that a human’s giving of themselves to another is not the same as the slavery of the Africans to the Europeans, using the example of chivalry to get the point across. But, here we have Wonder Woman, played by an Israeli, starting to enter the picture. This entrance would take another turn when the Snydercon started to get under way.
A bunch of rumors started to appear that Gal Gadot would be at the Snydercon. Yep. So I am converting to Judaism and trying to comply with a perceived divine imperative for a mission to Israel. On the way to Israel my interest in Zack Snyder’s story and movies starts to consume me. I start to advocate for the whole phenomenon, and lo and behold, after saying next to nothing about everything for the longest time, Zack organizes a Snydercon, and apparently the Israeli Wonder Woman is invited. It’s sort of like separate themes of my life are converging around all of this, yet everything is from a thematic analysis of a dream world that I was experiencing at that time. I have never met any of these people. I have no experience in film. No contacts. I’d been ideating about Zack for quite some time, and Gal was getting added to the mix, in something of an ancillary way, but the Israeli involvement in my superhero saga wasn’t lost on me.
I decided to look into Gal Gadot a bit. Trying to learn about an actor is not easy. They are professional impersonators. Some are character actors and pride themselves on playing characters that bear no relation to themselves. In fact, in acting school, conjuring a reaction that you just don’t have in you is touted as the height of acting skill.
Carl Jung and the eastern spiritual traditions would say that everyone has everyone else in them. The collective unconscious. The bible is also not silent on this matter.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27
There is just too much theology here to explain the correspondence between the collective unconscious and the idea that man is an image of the divine to give a good explanation. I’ll just say that the things that God ordains to happen to a man is a product of that man.
I found that Gal’s roles are related to her personal beauty and an innate sense of strength that exudes from her that she adapts to different characters. She is always playing some version of Gal. Nevertheless, I haven’t developed a confidence in my understanding of who she is just from her public face, which includes her movies and Instagram account.
What I am trying to say with this, though, is that as I was completely going crazy in Amman, a soup of connections and individuals began to form in my mind that constituted a sort of a story with meaning to me, though I know nothing of any of the indviduals involved or any of the details that actually went on from the perspective of the people who were involved with these movies. I’m into God and Israel as well as superhero movies, and I was sitting there in Jordan while a movement was exercising itself surrounding superhero movies that contain a profound biblical and theological story, and one of the characters in the story was played by an Israeli actress.
As far as I have been able to tell, Gal Gadot did not make it to the Snydercon…but neither did I. I’m still recuperating psychologically from not making it, in fact. I’d put missing that conference up there with my war experiences and my divorce as one of the toughest things that’s ever happened to me.
As I wrap up this saga, Wilson, I wanted to add this Israel Wonder Woman aspect to show that there seems to be a certain order and connection between these disparate realms in my own mental world. I’m reading the details to see what kind of meaning I can derive from it for indications of what God wants me to do going forward.
Also, the trip to Israel was meant to either succeed, or allow me to leave the situation with the feeling that I had done everything possible, and that I would have no regrets if, in the event that my voyage to the Holy Land failed, I decided that I was done with it and would never feel any obligation to continue. If the mission to Israel didn’t work, I could finally be like everybody else and go wherever the hell I want to go and do whatever the hell I want to do.
So I called a bunch of Israelis and some Christian foreigners to get some help, and nothing panned out. Nobodys and strangers aren’t going to be high up on anybody’s list. Except for the Christians, all of the people I reached out to were Israelis. Many of my posts about Israel and Israelis have been rather harsh, not out of any particular hatred for the country or the people, but because I am describing my hardships in my usual way. I do hope that my misadventures don’t give a negative impression of the country or the people. In the event that anyone thinks so, I have this here to say that there was one Israeli that I never got around to calling. It may just be that if I had done that, I would be where I wanted to go rather than where I am now.
It was a crazy time, Wilson. And it still is.
