KHEN SHISH

Beginnings are hard places to be in. At every starting point one sets, there are already awkward patterns seething beneath the surface, fragments of experience, forgotten traditions, self–annulment, night terrors, instincts, conditioned behaviors, neurons bundling together, contact, closeness, rejection, heredity embodied in a glance, a smile, silent seals, faltering speech, disciplining, crying, so much crying, bitter cries, muffled laments, insubordinate laughter:

To have an infinite memory, without grasping what parts of it are expected to survive, to flicker as a recurrence, as a future, what parts of it are false, what parts scar the flesh; to have an inexhaustible passion without suspecting the limitations on its realization; to have a wound without comprehending the laws of pain and bleeding, bleeding and pain; to have a language without knowing the alphabet, without recognizing typeface subtleties, the vibrations of the voice, the melodies, the accents, the flexibility of the lungs, the stiffness of the palate and throat, the vowels and the gestures; to stand at the gate of making, which was meant for no one but you, which was not yet forged for you, which is unlikely to ever come true; to exist within an exegesis whose allegory is nowhere to be found: you cut a linear slash, a slit—to which past do you long to glimpse? from which past are you eager to emerge?—or do you merely set out to illustrate the struggle of glimpsing, the effort of emerging?

The Soul, in its initial phases, is devoid of awareness. It is attracted to the raw material, which resembles it in nature—the cheap, rough paper, the plaster on the wall, household detergents, sand, coal, the greasy leftovers of existence, of the demands of the hour and place, uncontrollable knocks, naked in their vulgar generality, sheets of stickers from a craft class, pages from a crumpled notebook, crushed pencils in their cases, dull, dissolving graphite strings.

But time transforms it into evidence.

Under whose pressure?

Under the pressure of the defense, under the pressure of the prosecution, on behalf of that Soul condemned to guess its steps, on behalf of that dim emotional struggle, which becomes ever so sharp and clear as it occurs; all the senses stretch towards it, towards the desire to be, but to be what—to draw on what it had already suffered, or to aspire for what befell others and was shaped into art... Eureka, that׳s it, the word was found, the concept presented itself; art, the self, and the world intensify, trembling with anticipation at being born, heavy; immense star systems and nerves, black holes and skin cells are swallowed within them, firmament and earth compressed together, nailed at the fingertips. And the Soul is ready to emerge, to break forth, to be poured out.

There is no greater moment than this. And lo, it only just occurred and it is already prepared to contract into a dot, a coordinate to which one is pushed to return, to open up, to stop it from becoming a silent sign. Perhaps there is no escape from getting caught up in that age–old story, which lurks throughout childhood, slipping away evasively, and only the first work of art, the line, the incision, force it to seep into revelation—the story of the investigation into the self, which stumbles over and over on the pitfalls of memory. Where is the trail of breadcrumbs scattered by the Soul to mark the way home. Birds fed on it, the digestive system of reality and its emissaries, innocent devious beaks, small parasitic stomachs, they devoured it all, metamorphosed, with acids and chemical messages, with webs of electric shocks, exchanged for chirping, singing, shouting.

There is no greater moment than this. The Soul pretends: she slowly learns the principles of the living, the cultures, the trampling nature of ideologies, the murderous grace of love; she will carve out the echoes of the wound and adapt them to the trill–ornamented, smug, urgent singing; she will discover her own identity before succumbing to art׳s seduction, before praxis, before rumors coming from afar, before mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers promised her, swore to testify.

The Soul misleads one on the way to the truth; the guises it assumes and the trickery it employs are all true—fineries and portraits of the abject, the crash, the crystallinity of that which is cast away, bound to the corporeal, captive in concepts, the refined cruelty of gender, education, the barbed wire of citizenship; a wild space in which the Soul will dwell in familiar body forms, reliable, teeming with the present.

Is this who you assign me to be, she will wonder before Master World. Well, that׳s a shame, this is what I can be now... sorry for sabotaging your courtyard, Mistress Convention... no, I’m not sorry... I messed up on purpose... I colored outside the lines... I׳ll sit with you both forever and insist: a good line, a bad line... Master World, you doubt my ability to discern; Mistress Convention, you deny my right to decide... but a good line is a silhouette of an ancient line, as much as it scratches the contours of the lines that follow... it is not the right, original, final line... but adherence to the ability to distinguish between a saturated line and an empty line is the law of ethics… aesthetics... it is the song of the protesting, rebellious Soul, my song for the time being...

Master World will harden the tone of his words, Mistress Convention will frown: who will vouch for you? We either adhere to the absolute, or to the relative, contrived, loose, manipulated, malicious.
Brain researchers will come, and mind experts, the Soul will claim, and the insidious paradox of memory will be told... All recollection is the conjuring up of an impression of an incident, an event, a sensory experience, their rewriting and re-encryption, indefatigable imagining... Only in amnesiacs, who have no access to their memory, is the form of the impression preserved... Amnesia is the formaldehyde of reality... It protects the embryonic form of the existent... Inside there is always the terrible wheel: longing, desire, wound, language, and so on... It is impossible to break the wheel... to shake off the wishful thinking about a pure virginal eye, bathed in a hidden light, Ohr HaGanuz that emanates at the dawn of creation...

Beginnings are hard places to be in. You have to erase the reincarnations, the yearning, the cleanliness of the cries that arise in light of the purity of others׳ creative work, to give up any schemes of detection, the flood of hints, one always stops at them, the first steps through the gate of making, crossing the line, carving it. There are no greater moments than these—the Soul assumes the space, and the walls delimiting it are compacted, dense, with the big bang, with its signs, with a primeval language, with clocks rushing to move on, with years ready to charge ahead in circles.