The sand spills downward, attracted by the magnet of the earth. The measure
of the hand is what contains the sand and creates a private measure of time
in the same action: a sandglass. But it is not the invention of the
ingenious object that I wish to point to, but the private body that shapes
its environment according to its measure, ability and desire, and continues
this chain of endless creation according to the changes it undergoes.
The story that it writes - and one may point as well to the house that it
builds, to its private architectural language - has no beginning and no
end, and it is always present. A thousand and one nights, each night
already enfolded in the other and being shaped anew each day according to
the same fundamentals it embodies all the while, a story the center of
which is always the moment that is being written.
The fifth book of the Bible, Deuteronomy (in Hebrew: Debarim, Things, or
Utterances), which follows Numbers (in Hebrew: Ba-midbar, In the Desert),
not only begins with the words of God and ends with their compilation into
a book (object), but also presents a network of things that relate to one
another like a book of mirrors. But it is not this ingenious object that I
wish to point to, but the living stage prior to its formulation as
described in the book of Numbers, the forty years of wandering in the
desert during which the Children of Israel shaped their identity. This was
not a progression along a single axis, but a wandering that lacked
direction or any visible object. Imagine, if you will, a ball in its
natural development, attracting to its center, as it revolves, items from
its environment. Imagine the time that passes until its form emerges.
(Wandering inside the city is different, because of the abundance of
objects - which have, on the one hand, a real presence, and symbolic and
significant meanings, on the other hand. The presence of self-evident
magicians on every street corner or intersection shouldn't arouse any
wonder. The moment of confusion and wonder that they offer - the purpose of
which, to all appearances, is to make you forget for a moment your present
whereabouts - is only intended to relocate you on the coordinates of the
map. The city, then, not only requires you always to remember, and
facilitates your finding your way inside it; it also provides all the drugs
necessary to see inside it for a moment the possibility of its being a
desert.)
In the 'desert' (I emphasize the word because I am no longer referring to
the actual desert which exists 'there,' but to that concept, the
constituent elements of which I had to construct before in order to break
it down into them) only the spoken text and the ink exist, until the moment
they must be compiled into an object (book) and translated from one space
of existence to another (this is the work of the artisan, of the designer,
attentive first and foremost to the technical and functional parameters of
the object). Therefore it can be said that (in the desert) the act of
reading precedes the act of writing.
It is important, then, that the book be written as a series of footnotes, a
compilation of different moments, different conceptions, and their revision
as some kind of totality. In their intersecting the end points are the ones
that create several possible centers of wandering.
Uri Tzaig
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