At long last, Ayin’s second annual journal has arrived: Ayin Two | The Holy Fool. With this collection of essays, poems, stories, and multimedia work, we welcome the Fool into our midst as the muse of wild hope, the archetype of accidental enlightenment, the spirit of the carnivalesque, holding all things and their opposites. From Tarot to Torah, awe to absurdity, messiah to myopia—the Fool challenges norms, upsets expectations, and interrupts all manner of official proceedings, offering us a world of playful alternatives to the padded rooms of common sense. As Eden Pearlstein writes in his editor’s note: “Across time, space, and culture, the figure of the Fool appears irrepressibly—not as a mirror of our shortcomings, but as an archetype of unlikely epiphany.”
In the “pages” and portals of Ayin Two, begin at the end, or end at the beginning. Here, “the child is a prophet, the beggar is a king, the king is a clown, the snake is the moshiach.”
Undertorah takes readers on a journey through the root systems of the dreamworld. A practical and paradigm-shifting guidebook for individuals and communities, this text offers a transformative approach to contemporary dreamwork, grounded in embodied experience and ancestral wisdom, that connects us to spirit and inspires us to heal our world.
Ayin Press is an artist-run publishing platform, production studio, and research collective rooted in Jewish culture and emanating outward. We create and support work at the intersection of Political Imagination, Speculative Theology, and Radical Aesthetics.
From the Archive
Rimoun Rametni | Salim Halali
Another song from Salim Halali’s repertoire is “Rimoun Rametni,” a classical Andalusian song.1 The original likely dates back to the ...
Two Songs
Constellation Chor is a vocal performance collective founded and directed by Marisa Michelson. Its intention at inception, and still to ...
LightDarkness: A Musical Composition & Graphic Rendering of a Kabbalistic Poem by Abulafia (with Commentary)
“Ohr Hoshech” by Victoria Hanna: “Ohr Hoshech” by Avraham Abulafia: Avraham Leader on Abulafia’s “LightDarkness”: Rabbi Avraham Abulafia, a thirteenth-century ...
What Kind of Fool Am I: Tarot and the Midrashic Art of Divination
If you don’t know you’re on the Fool’s Journey, you’re on a fool’s errand. Recently I did a tarot reading ...
Fred
Fred is a series of image sequences that I made during the 2020 Quarantine. After the New York City-wide shelter-in-place ...
Ya Ghorbati | Line Monty
In 1971, Line Monty released a heart-wrenching song called “Ma Guitare et Mon Pays” (My Guitar and My Country), composed ...
Editor’s Note: Field of the Letter Vav
The letter Vav, a simple vertical line, is the sixth letter in the Hebrew Aleph-Bet. Grammatically, the Vav functions as ...
Legba Swaying
Legba Swaying is a solo piece gathering creolizing glimpses of presence, questions, belonging, remembrance and release, rhizoming in performative and ...
Three Poems
Five Days in Paris If the world doesn’t explode I will see you Wednesday. It’s hard to say if it’s ...
The Holy Fool: Editor’s Note
We must occasionally find pleasure in our folly, or we cannot continue to find pleasure in our wisdom. —Friedrich Nietzsche1 ...