The crazy thing about writing an “About Me” is the shortness of it.

No matter how long.

And how to sort through all that life you lived, and what do you present?

So many years, so many years of peaks and troughs, of going through things, some of which you regret, and some of which you despise yourself bitterly for, and some of which you remember with joy.

Above all, there are the peaks of this biography, and the peaks were always associated with a Eureka moment, a moment that you suddenly realize something about reality, a moment when something dawns on you in a way that is amazing, because suddenly the entire world is not as you thought it was.

It’s a different world. It’s something else. It’s something that was not there before, because before you did not have this perception. So it’s simultaneously self-creating and illuminating what was before, who you were before, and who you are after.

A moment of revelation is two completely different things. The one is the unknower, the ignorant, the one who did not realize, but who thought very well of himself, that he knows whatever. The moment before the Eureka moment, you are still you.

You still think you know what you know, and there’s no suspicion in your mind that you are about to be transformed. I remember at 16, walking home from school with a tiny book that I learned from the even tinier school lending library.

So I was walking and it was Freud’s “Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Forget the convoluted theories and speculations of old Sigmund about things that motivated here.

The point of inspiration of that brilliant little book was that there was a Real beyond Real and suddenly you have become the unreliable narrator.

I, the one who knew, the one with the consciousness, the one with the ego, had become an unreliable narrator.

This is the crazy thing about this. How could I be an unreliable narrator?

I am me. But it turns out there is another me that causes you to forget, that causes you to fear, that causes you to tremble and change and do stuff.

So who, am I?

Well, that will remain forever unfathomable, even to myself – except for glimmerings of insight.

But I can be known by what I do, what I’m involved in, which makes me out to be a philosopher, a theologist, a son, husband, father, grandfather. A Rabbi and an armchair psychologist; a student of the history and philosophy of science, as well as a fearsome autodidact, but more than anything else, I am a lover of the Real.

This means that I always turn to reality, to teach me how to live and what to do and what to think.

There is science!

There is proof in the pudding. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I am a songwriter and a translator of ideas into songs, into rhymes.

The canisters of the language, when they find their space within rhyme, fall upon the soul, like the patter of soft morning rain in a green garden.

my first horrible nightmares from which I would wake up screaming and sweating, a four-year-old in true panic, were those that involved those charlatans that eventually eat you up,

The cannibalistic charlatans.

Above Red Riding Hood’s wolf would spring up from the milkman’s cart and devour me, and Hansel and Gretel’s cannibalistic witch would poke my flesh to see if I was ripe for the oven…

I don’t know today, there’s so many categories in the cultural agreement about the shape of elves and so on, following Dungeons and Dragons and other books that define for us our fantasies. So funny. Mapping out our fantasies so we don’t get lost in them. Or at least giving us the tools to mapping out our characters, which is so funny, this description of, I’m not knocking it. It’s great for a lot of people to play together because you have to agree. Everybody has to know what this or that character is because all we have is externalities. But it’s funny the way the Dungeons and Dragons takes the internality and makes it an externality.

Anyway, I’m not the big expert on Dungeons and Dragons, but still, it’s funny.

Anyway, why was I talking about this? Because books were ultimately my salvation, from everything, from the fears, the unknown psychological fears that moved me. The books were there. They were the ones.

And the crazy thing about writing your own bio and singing your own praises is that you become too attached to all kinds of stuff in your life that ultimately are not interesting to anyone.

And all the long gone things like the taste of a good homemade chocolate custard made by my mother. It still lingers with me, and I don’t know how to recreate it, nor will I because now I don’t eat carbs; or the shapes of containers that were so prominent in your childhood when you first began realizing there was a world outside yourself and those containers are long gone because the packaging industry has undergone so many revolutions since then.

So living a long time has this strange quality of living in a time capsule because the same person who lived in the past is now living in the future.

And the thing is that you’re only in the time capsule retrospectively. So looking back on your life, what are you going to put in your bio? Well, of course, in your bio you want to put your best foot forward and also you want to give your readers a conception of what they are in store for.

What does it mean? What does Dawns On mean? This is the artist’s name that I took it for myself.

So it’s like Dawn and seeking and meaning, and then put it all together, and the most revelatory moment in my life, reading the psychopathology of everyday life for the first time, maybe the only time,

Psychoanalysis uses the story of Oedipus as a subtext for your spirit, for your personality. And in many ways, I try in my songs, in these lyrics that I write, to achieve these things, to find the subtext of things, to find what lies beyond things, what lies underneath, and also to find that place to recreate that Eureka moment when you realize that in-depth introspection on something yields a different perspective, yields new knowledge that you weren’t aware of before. And contributive to that new knowledge are books, people. I can’t begin even to tell you the importance of books, the importance of voracious reading.

And I must say that it takes a certain kind of personality that tries to shy away from the vicissitudes of the real, from the pains that are abundant in all social reality, social reality that is always abrasive, where intentions are always misunderstood and only the externality of your personality is seen when you are perceived as a person. Perceived as a commodity rather than the many-layered oddity that you are because what people can access is always the commodity of who you are, what you give them, what you are capable of doing, the role you have which occupies this place in the social structure, this is my role, this is me, and always I feel so uncomfortable because I’m always more than the sum of my parts and all people can have are the parts.

So in my lyrics, in these songs, I try to find a way to say some of the things that are inspiring: those eureka moments that are found in books and in life, and in researching subjects deeply and reading voraciously until ultimately you reach some conclusion that is very different from what you started out with.

Maybe you are surrounded now by savannah, and once you top that mountain it will be a forest, or a sea spreading out below. Who knows? But you cannot know, because you are not there yet. And always we are where we are, and in order to get to a new place, we cannot stop being what we are, what we think.

So it’s, the more you grow, the more you are capable of growing, as the great, one of the greatest. Sages said, it’s only when you are ready, when you are, when the wick has been developed sufficiently that the light can, that it can sustain the light or the light can catch it, the fire can catch it.

So you have to know a lot more before you can catch the fire of the Eureka moment when it dawns on you. And often it’s, it’s books. Here I’m going to give you a list of books, some of the books that were for me Eureka moments.

So this is again the idea that whatever people believe has effects in reality that are unforeseen. They give rise to new stuff, to new things. The Protestant Revolution gave rise to secularity even though it began with the most fanatic display of faith. Because it broke the mold, it gave space to new things. And more than that, it’s more than the Protestant revolution, it was the Peace of Westphalia which ultimately led Europe to its unburdening itself of the pall of religious belief, because it allowed treatment of reality as a form of revelation and discovering God not in scripture but in nature, which is the great turn to the Real that I describe in no uncertain terms through 19 chapters called Evotrust or Believing the Real on my YouTube channel, if you want some theoretical background.

So it’s like these philosophical musings, these realizations that led me up to set all kinds of abbreviations like FIOTIO, the Fundamental Ignorance Of The Individual, or TISWOORIOM, The Intersubjective World of Others Represented In Our Minds.

So I made a T-shirt and maybe I will one day sell it as merch. It says that the TISWOORIOM is the true matrix. I never wear it because I keep it for some occasion which I don’t know when that occasion will ever come but I save it for the day when I need it. Here’s a photograph of this.

You can see that how Dawns On came from this. It dawns on you that reality is different from what you see now.

I can see now that it’s held down by John Irving books….

Okay, yeah, so ultimately this is what I’m trying to get through with my songs. Some of them are like anecdotes on a different kind of doing, like the collages I make.

I’m trying to share these Eureka moments that I’ve had in my voracious reading, in my thoughts, through my experience of many years and going through many worlds, raised up in some of the greatest traditions of humanism, then involving myself deeply into religion. I am an ordained rabbi, then through my investigations, deciding or finding a faith that I believed in, which I call Evotrus. Again, I direct you to my series of talks about Believing the Real, and my ideas were deeply influenced by Rabbi Kook, little known outside a very small circle of Hebrew speakers, who viewed the Theory of Evolution as a true revelation.

At some point he asks: If you have evolution, why do you need religion? And he says: well, you know, you get a few shortcuts. If you have religion, you have a shortcut.

Well, I’m not sure his shortcut is the ultimate best, but certainly if you live a life of integrity and purpose, then you have found a shortcut, because the purpose is always hidden. It’s always a blur of quantum reality in which everything is possible, but you meet the world as the only possible one, which is another conundrum, another riddle to be solved. How is it that we have such a concrete world?

Books ultimately let you meet the way that the Real has been filtered through the minds of others, whether through fiction and nonfiction. I have a lot to say about that in my series of talks.

But ultimately, in songs, as a songwriter, under the Nom de Plume of Dawns On, I try to condense these emotion-laid Eureka moments, because music is this amazing interface between mind and emotion, between the heart and the soul.

Your heart beats faster in moments of eureka and hormones spread through your body, adrenaline and other stuff. And music does that. Music bridges the gap between the intellectual and the emotional. It’s always there.

AI is now my helper as I write those lyrics that come from the deep place of Eureka. The robot is now my friend in singing along, singing the words, finding the right music.

It’s a search. It takes sometimes many many hours to find the right combination of music, melody and singing that give the force that I need to my lyrics but I insist and ultimately my lyrics express these dawns on ideas that should dawn on you hopefully and that I hope will give you the pleasure of both the emotional layer of the music, and the boost, the illumination of understanding, the flash, the invigorating, intoxicating flash of understanding when your intellect sees something differently than it did before, more deeply, more feelingly, more thoroughly, because intellect and emotion are never truly divorced, and in song this comes to the fore, because the words and the music blend together into something that your soul can reverberate with, can resonate with.

So you’re invited to follow my art as it unfolds under Dawns On, and hopefully one of these songs, or maybe more than one, will dawn on you. You’ll realize something that you didn’t realize before, and you will joyfully laugh as I burst out in spurts of joy when those eureka moments come about, when suddenly you realize something, you realize the depth of something that was never there before, and this is the main idea that my songs are dedicated to.

You are invited to contribute to may enterprise and sustain me in my labors as I slowly phase out from being a professional freelance translator.

You are invited to donate something from your own stream of life to my stream of life.

This is what I do now: I write, I still write nonfiction. The great love of my life is non-fiction because the whole of reality is a bit of a fiction. It’s fictitious in the sense that it’s all just quantum particles spinning around and yet it’s so tangible and so insurmountable and so painful that you just don’t understand how it can be. And for that, of course, there are quite a bit of theological musings.

Collages are also intermixed with my life. I try to surround myself in an environment that reflects some of what I have inside. So I’m always pasting things on my walls.

Here’s a photo of my entrance hall. This is what you see when you go into my flat.

But the blue and yellow color combination of my curtains over there. I did not think of Ikea when I did this.

And when I plan bits of fiction for a book, I do it on the wall, and It’s part collage, part corkboard.

And sometimes I work ideas through with a collage. Like unfinished piece, a triptych about money, the production of money. It tries to work through how money is created.

And it’s all on my wardrobe, the bedroom cupboard, as you can see.

Songwriting is at the apex of this activity because it is concise, it is condensed, it is finding the language to say the most abstract ideas, the most sometimes fleeting and ephemeral and diaphanous ideas and trying to give them flesh in words, but the words themselves are hinged upon the consciousness of the listener.

The words that I elicit from my being cross the void and reach into your being. When you listen to a song and the words come into your consciousness Then we are communicating. This is the telepathic moment in which you share the thought and if that thought is a kernel that is going to burst with meaning, it’s a kernel that will reach into your own mind and give you that idea, then that kernel is what I’m trying to do.

So, yes, absolutely, I hope it dawns on you, whatever it is.

We need to have those eureka moments that show us a new horizon, a new vista. So I will try, and I always strive, in every song that I write, to convey that, to get that idea across, and many of my songs are part of a series, because of the complexity, intricacy, and details of everything, because everything can be seen at a deeper resolution, and all the perspectives are necessary to form the ultimate image, which is never an ultimate, which is always evolving.

If you’re evolving thoughts on a matter, then the various layers have to be seen. And sometimes the dawns on moment is postponed because you’ve just seen one palette and it’s okay no big deal, then you see another aspect, okay, and then another and another, and then suddenly at the fifth or five hundred and fifth layer or approach to this particular subject, suddenly they merge together and you see the interconnections between the various aspects and you have that dawns on moment when you see something new on the horizon of your personality. From the depth of your FIOTI you grasp something.