// literary & arts //
Spring 2016
Meir Ariel, “The Iron Beast,” Charcoal Drawings
Translation and Commentary
Avinoam J. Stillman
Metal Era, Iron Age
Reminds me of a beast from Daniel’s Vision
Metal Beast, Iron Beast
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon
A vision in a dream Daniel saw:
And four great beasts rose from the sea,
Each one representing a kingdom in the world.
And the fourth was different and stranger than the preceding,
Scary and threatening and powerful in its movements,
With giant iron teeth eating and shredding,
And the rest with bronze nails trampling
And it had ten horns and the smallest of them sprouted and grew
And there popped out humanoid eyes
And a mouth speaking greatly, boasting,
its end to be slaughtered and ruined.
Metal Beast, Iron Beast
A strange kingdom that Daniel saw
Metal Era, Iron Age
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
All these toothy towers, chomping the sky-blue,
All these peaks on the graphs.
Iron like crocodile, metal like mule
Iron like bird, giraffe metal.
Gilded iron, wily metal,
Flowing with electronics, injected with data.
The face of a maidservant, not making a fuss,
With the biggest network of double agents,
All these computers,
These tranquilizers, these uprooters,
Of our fingers… from our world…
Metal Era, Iron Age.
This fourth that Daniel saw.
In night visions, then in Babylon
Is it, now, again, coming to pass?
Shredding, trampling, destroying, crushing,
And marketing these as freedom of speech.
Sucking and spitting, using and throwing
A bone to the analysts of public rights.
Horns rule from afar, eyes in all places,
Mouth never ceasing to blab.
Saying what to want, what to think,
What to be, what to do, and how to act.
And the masses, the masses, half automatic,
Traumatized by the hidden silver hammers,
Running, running commanded by flickering flashes
Wrapped in a scroll of conditions and rights
Drugged on progress and developments,
To work without knowledge and to serve,
To service, and to oil the…
Metal Beast, Iron Beast,
Its tendrils reach to every place
The reign of metal, the kingdom of iron,
Human beings, drops of blood and dandruff.
It’s accepted that the fourth is Rome.
It’s accepted that Rome is Edom.
Just so or symbolically, there’s plenty of Rome today.
This whole world-wide Colosseum,
With observation windows on the stage.
Full of predatory gladiators,
And blood soaking the subconscious.
Switch stations! Change channels!
Wander as your soul desires in the world.
Think that you’re outside of all this,
This doesn’t touch you, it’s over there.
But in the meantime what really happens,
Is that you’re just another one who shoots and shoots,
Gets used to killing at the push of a button
Predator... gladiator...
Metal Era, Iron Age,
Reminds me of a beast from Daniel’s Vision.
Metal Beast, Iron Beast,
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me and the visions of my head terrified me.
[Daniel 7:11 and 15, sung in Aramaic]
Appropriating Apocalypse
The songs of Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Ariel have attained an almost scriptural status for many Israelis. Often dubbed “the Israeli Bob Dylan” (although I tend to think of Leonard Cohen as a better analogue), Ariel described his inner and outer worlds with rich, allusive language and folk-rock melodies. His life itself encompassed many of the repercussive changes in Israeli society from the 1960s until his death in 1999. As a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1960s, Ariel fought in the battles for Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Indeed, he first came to fame for his 1967 song “Jerusalem of Iron,” a darkly ironic adaptation of Naomi Shemer’s Zionist anthem “Jerusalem of Gold.” Ariel was a quintessential kibbutznik--raised on Kibbutz Mishmarot in northern Israel—until he rebelled against the strictures of kibbutz life and left for Tel Aviv in 1987. Towards the end of his life, Ariel experienced an idiosyncratic “return” to Judaism, embracing Jewish ritual and text study before it became trendy for Israeli musicians to do so. His spare, biting 1995 album Charcoal Drawings reflects all these aspects of his life. In the album’s opening song, “The Iron Beast,” Ariel uses the grotesque imagery of Daniel 7 to bemoan the injustices and atrocities of the post-modern world. As he sees it, individuals are oppressed by industrialized violence and the technological dehumanization of labor. Decades after his army service, Ariel harkens back to that transformation of young men into soldiers. In a further critique of the military-industrial complex, Ariel addresses the impacts of commodification and technology on human labor; his lyrics reveal the dark underbelly of the rise of high-tech business and privatization in Israel in the 1990s.
Ariel’s apocalyptic visions of the iron beast come from the past—rhetorically, from the prehistoric Iron Age—but they also inhabit the modern “Metal Era.” The teeth and horns of the beast become skyscrapers and the sharp peaks of line graphs. The beast’s eyes become technologies of surveillance, and its mouth symbolizes mass media. Under “the rule of metal, the kingdom of iron,” human beings are just “blood and dandruff.” Ariel also echoes the traditional rabbinic interpretation of the “fourth kingdom,” the iron beast of Daniel’s vision. The Talmud identifies the iron beast with the Roman Empire, associated further with the biblical Esau and his descendants, the Edomites. Rome exemplifies militarism; Esau was a hunter, and the color red—blood—is denoted by the word “edom” in Hebrew. This constellation of symbols underlies Ariel’s evocation of a “whole world-wide Colosseum” enabled by technology. Televised wars in far-off countries play to the same human urges as gladiatorial combat, saturating day-to-day life with images of violence. For a brief moment, Ariel exhorts his listener to “Wander as your soul desires in the world,” but his call for individual freedom is futile. One cannot get outside the system: in the end, even the wandering soul becomes a predator, a gladiator. Indeed, “The Iron Beast” wholly omits the salvific aspects of the text of Daniel. The abstruse Aramaic of Daniel and the associative typologies of the rabbis come back to life in Ariel’s rendering, but it seems that redemption cannot be read into the modern context as easily.
In translating Ariel’s song, I attempted to capture his juxtaposition of biblical archaisms with modern industrial imagery. However, beyond the stylistic and topical issues, I also needed to translate from sound to text. In his recording, Ariel accompanies himself on guitar, with occasional passages of accordion. The song is spare, its melody almost spoken. Ariel sings an incantatory rhythm, alternating between short lines and longer phrases, a pattern I hoped to reproduce in the English. Ellipses signify moments when Ariel lets his words trail off, leaving the full implications of his vision to the imagination of his audience. The song closes with Ariel’s intonation of verses from Daniel, their Aramaic cadences both familiar and foreign to Hebrew-speaking Israelis.
Ariel’s song is in itself something of a translation. He translates Daniel into modernity, adapting the apocalyptic to Israeli popular culture. Yet Ariel reframes contemporary routines as violent and foreign, evoking an estranged tension. By creating a layered experience of proximity and distance, Ariel hopes to awaken his audience to the situation in which they are embedded, even if he cannot offer them, except obliquely, any hope. In bringing his “translation” of Daniel’s apocalypse to a contemporary Anglophone audience, I aim to open a window onto the complex interpenetrations of Jewish literature and social and political critique in one of Israel’s finest singer-songwriters. Walter Benjamin, in his On the Concept of History, writes that “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Ariel’s creation seizes on the remembered biblical image of the iron beast, appropriating it in his own nation’s moment of danger. In the two decades which have passed since Ariel wrote “The Iron Beast,” that moment of danger seems not to have subsided, nor has the potency of his vision.
Reminds me of a beast from Daniel’s Vision
Metal Beast, Iron Beast
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon
A vision in a dream Daniel saw:
And four great beasts rose from the sea,
Each one representing a kingdom in the world.
And the fourth was different and stranger than the preceding,
Scary and threatening and powerful in its movements,
With giant iron teeth eating and shredding,
And the rest with bronze nails trampling
And it had ten horns and the smallest of them sprouted and grew
And there popped out humanoid eyes
And a mouth speaking greatly, boasting,
its end to be slaughtered and ruined.
Metal Beast, Iron Beast
A strange kingdom that Daniel saw
Metal Era, Iron Age
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
All these toothy towers, chomping the sky-blue,
All these peaks on the graphs.
Iron like crocodile, metal like mule
Iron like bird, giraffe metal.
Gilded iron, wily metal,
Flowing with electronics, injected with data.
The face of a maidservant, not making a fuss,
With the biggest network of double agents,
All these computers,
These tranquilizers, these uprooters,
Of our fingers… from our world…
Metal Era, Iron Age.
This fourth that Daniel saw.
In night visions, then in Babylon
Is it, now, again, coming to pass?
Shredding, trampling, destroying, crushing,
And marketing these as freedom of speech.
Sucking and spitting, using and throwing
A bone to the analysts of public rights.
Horns rule from afar, eyes in all places,
Mouth never ceasing to blab.
Saying what to want, what to think,
What to be, what to do, and how to act.
And the masses, the masses, half automatic,
Traumatized by the hidden silver hammers,
Running, running commanded by flickering flashes
Wrapped in a scroll of conditions and rights
Drugged on progress and developments,
To work without knowledge and to serve,
To service, and to oil the…
Metal Beast, Iron Beast,
Its tendrils reach to every place
The reign of metal, the kingdom of iron,
Human beings, drops of blood and dandruff.
It’s accepted that the fourth is Rome.
It’s accepted that Rome is Edom.
Just so or symbolically, there’s plenty of Rome today.
This whole world-wide Colosseum,
With observation windows on the stage.
Full of predatory gladiators,
And blood soaking the subconscious.
Switch stations! Change channels!
Wander as your soul desires in the world.
Think that you’re outside of all this,
This doesn’t touch you, it’s over there.
But in the meantime what really happens,
Is that you’re just another one who shoots and shoots,
Gets used to killing at the push of a button
Predator... gladiator...
Metal Era, Iron Age,
Reminds me of a beast from Daniel’s Vision.
Metal Beast, Iron Beast,
So similar that I’m terror-struck…
I watched then because of the noise of the arrogant words that the horn was speaking. And as I watched, the beast was put to death, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. As for me, Daniel, my spirit was troubled within me and the visions of my head terrified me.
[Daniel 7:11 and 15, sung in Aramaic]
Appropriating Apocalypse
The songs of Israeli singer-songwriter Meir Ariel have attained an almost scriptural status for many Israelis. Often dubbed “the Israeli Bob Dylan” (although I tend to think of Leonard Cohen as a better analogue), Ariel described his inner and outer worlds with rich, allusive language and folk-rock melodies. His life itself encompassed many of the repercussive changes in Israeli society from the 1960s until his death in 1999. As a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1960s, Ariel fought in the battles for Jerusalem in the Six Day War. Indeed, he first came to fame for his 1967 song “Jerusalem of Iron,” a darkly ironic adaptation of Naomi Shemer’s Zionist anthem “Jerusalem of Gold.” Ariel was a quintessential kibbutznik--raised on Kibbutz Mishmarot in northern Israel—until he rebelled against the strictures of kibbutz life and left for Tel Aviv in 1987. Towards the end of his life, Ariel experienced an idiosyncratic “return” to Judaism, embracing Jewish ritual and text study before it became trendy for Israeli musicians to do so. His spare, biting 1995 album Charcoal Drawings reflects all these aspects of his life. In the album’s opening song, “The Iron Beast,” Ariel uses the grotesque imagery of Daniel 7 to bemoan the injustices and atrocities of the post-modern world. As he sees it, individuals are oppressed by industrialized violence and the technological dehumanization of labor. Decades after his army service, Ariel harkens back to that transformation of young men into soldiers. In a further critique of the military-industrial complex, Ariel addresses the impacts of commodification and technology on human labor; his lyrics reveal the dark underbelly of the rise of high-tech business and privatization in Israel in the 1990s.
Ariel’s apocalyptic visions of the iron beast come from the past—rhetorically, from the prehistoric Iron Age—but they also inhabit the modern “Metal Era.” The teeth and horns of the beast become skyscrapers and the sharp peaks of line graphs. The beast’s eyes become technologies of surveillance, and its mouth symbolizes mass media. Under “the rule of metal, the kingdom of iron,” human beings are just “blood and dandruff.” Ariel also echoes the traditional rabbinic interpretation of the “fourth kingdom,” the iron beast of Daniel’s vision. The Talmud identifies the iron beast with the Roman Empire, associated further with the biblical Esau and his descendants, the Edomites. Rome exemplifies militarism; Esau was a hunter, and the color red—blood—is denoted by the word “edom” in Hebrew. This constellation of symbols underlies Ariel’s evocation of a “whole world-wide Colosseum” enabled by technology. Televised wars in far-off countries play to the same human urges as gladiatorial combat, saturating day-to-day life with images of violence. For a brief moment, Ariel exhorts his listener to “Wander as your soul desires in the world,” but his call for individual freedom is futile. One cannot get outside the system: in the end, even the wandering soul becomes a predator, a gladiator. Indeed, “The Iron Beast” wholly omits the salvific aspects of the text of Daniel. The abstruse Aramaic of Daniel and the associative typologies of the rabbis come back to life in Ariel’s rendering, but it seems that redemption cannot be read into the modern context as easily.
In translating Ariel’s song, I attempted to capture his juxtaposition of biblical archaisms with modern industrial imagery. However, beyond the stylistic and topical issues, I also needed to translate from sound to text. In his recording, Ariel accompanies himself on guitar, with occasional passages of accordion. The song is spare, its melody almost spoken. Ariel sings an incantatory rhythm, alternating between short lines and longer phrases, a pattern I hoped to reproduce in the English. Ellipses signify moments when Ariel lets his words trail off, leaving the full implications of his vision to the imagination of his audience. The song closes with Ariel’s intonation of verses from Daniel, their Aramaic cadences both familiar and foreign to Hebrew-speaking Israelis.
Ariel’s song is in itself something of a translation. He translates Daniel into modernity, adapting the apocalyptic to Israeli popular culture. Yet Ariel reframes contemporary routines as violent and foreign, evoking an estranged tension. By creating a layered experience of proximity and distance, Ariel hopes to awaken his audience to the situation in which they are embedded, even if he cannot offer them, except obliquely, any hope. In bringing his “translation” of Daniel’s apocalypse to a contemporary Anglophone audience, I aim to open a window onto the complex interpenetrations of Jewish literature and social and political critique in one of Israel’s finest singer-songwriters. Walter Benjamin, in his On the Concept of History, writes that “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” Ariel’s creation seizes on the remembered biblical image of the iron beast, appropriating it in his own nation’s moment of danger. In the two decades which have passed since Ariel wrote “The Iron Beast,” that moment of danger seems not to have subsided, nor has the potency of his vision.
\\ AVINOAM J. STILLMAN is a junior in Columbia College. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo "Teeth" by Flickr User Paul.