Frequently, in conversation with others or in an incessant inner monologue, I try to imagine what a world after this, after this political crisis, after this historical paroxysm, will look like. I love two countries — America and Israel — which have, let us say, transformed themselves. I am rich in crises, overwhelmed by hopelessness and heartache the causes of which are so enormous I cannot fully fathom their implications for the world or for my conception of myself. My loyalties torment me. After October 7 a certain cohort that has since fragmented spoke wistfully of “the day after,” but even in those early weeks the phrase was an insult to human wisdom. The phrase itself has become a synecdoche in my mind for our outrageous lack of a proper understanding of what was occurring around us and what we have become. I am trying to imagine an Israel-and-Palestine and an America in which the word “peace” means something substantial, a world in which that word has not been thinned to a pixelated, politicized flourish. But neither of these places — neither of my homes — are sufficiently familiar to me anymore, and so I do not trust my own intuitions about what will happen and what is possible in either context. I want ruminations on these futures to be rooted in reality, to be based in deep understandings of the peoples at stake. But it never feels that way. When I listen to or participate in discussions about a future worth living for, they feel grotesquely ignorant or fanciful. I think I know why that is. No one alive today was raised to understand the versions of our countries that exist now. This is not only because we were living “in a bubble,” but also because genuine transformations have taken place. And we cannot responsibly possess what we do not know. It is difficult to conceive of ourselves as leaders (or even members) of the strange places we live in now, these mutations of the countries we used to think of as ours but which have become alien to us. In my mind these ruminations are associated with a particular image of nullity. I am a painter and so I am familiar with the dread of staring at a blank canvas — and that is the sensation that comes over me when conversation turns to “the day after” and related themes. I recently spent an afternoon in my studio face to face with an easel on which there rested an unblemished canvas. The trouble was I did not have something particular I wanted to paint, I just wanted to be painting. I wanted to feel the brush sliding pleasantly along the slick primed surface. I wanted to make something intelligent and even beautiful. But that abstract yearning could not bear fruit. Beauty — the kind I am occasionally capable of when properly prepared, and the kind I most admire — is the result of having intimately understood an entrancing subject (entrancing at least to me) and communicating that intimate understanding through a medium over which I have a measure of control. Yearning to create some unknown beautiful thing is exactly like yearning to be in love without loving someone. What intimacy? What understanding? (A relevant Jewish piece of wisdom: in an essay excoriating a literary critic, the great Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz scolded, “It is not enough to write in Yiddish. You have to have something to say.”) Usually the memory of actively engaging with my bouts of creative sterility is disturbing enough to keep me from entering the studio without proper preparation. The urge to paint has to come from within. I need to be captivated by some subject and driven to communicate its seductions, to externalize in paint what has occurred inside me. I have to arrive at the easel possessed by this inspiration. The assignment of meaning to a subject comes from me: I am forced to action because of an inner necessity. I am not referring to “self-expression,” but rather to the effort to be loyal to my sense of an intuition or a perception. But in the realms of other loyalties, particularly collective and political allegiances, I act on values that I did not assign to myself but that were assigned to me. I used to move through the world armed with a profound sense of received meaning and conscious of the life choices that a serious life required of me. There was a time in my life when my sense of loyalty and honor was so concrete to me that I could rely on my inherited frameworks to give me both a worldview and a course of action. My life was plotted according to that heritage. This is no longer true. In so many essential ways the world I was born into does not any longer exist. The countries which I had been raised to love and serve have revealed characteristics so strange I cannot recognize them, so unattractive that I am no longer pulled toward them, though I still derive meaning from my loyalty to… them? To my idea of them? To a version of them for which I try to fight and in which I tell myself I still believe? If honor is a matter of loyalty, then honor will mean something new to me now. 
The artist Chaim Soutine called the compulsion to paint something new “being hit by lightning” or “the lightning bolt.” If it did not come, he would not paint; and not painting was, for him, a form of not living. Soutine experienced two of the most devastating horrors in human history and throughout both of them his primary context, his significant world, remained the canvas. The first of these crucibles was the first war. He spent much of World War I in the south of France weak with hunger (he had made no name for himself and so had no money for food), subsisting on
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence