Tales about manhood and memory / The Wall
With the Wall came a dryness of the eyes. A constant irritant and a thin,
annoying flow from the cavities of the nose to the back of the throat and downwards.
Hitting it gave me a painful itch. The approaching nothingness, a stifled breath
in high altitude, a dissolving knowledge, fading to the corners of its
features, an awaiting curtain of void. Once I learned to see it, the Wall was
everywhere. In the brown and grey smog laying over the Dan metropolitan area, visible
when looking westwards from the hills of Ben-Shemen. I saw it in the near
horizon, as cold and warm air interchange, during the morning practice, where
the city ends and the sea begins.
People were walking on the beach. The Wall cradled them gently. They walked
along its path and turned around; back and forth. Combat helicopters on routine
morning duty passed by. The coffee at the beach restaurant was awful but it was
served by a young man, a god of dawn, wearing a wetsuit, his long hair tied
nonchalantly on his back. Before operating
the espresso machine, he swam alone. Religiously practicing summers and
winters. He was the only one I have seen who tried swimming through the Wall
instead of following its path, until one stormy winter day, he hit his head
against a kurkar rock, and struggled with the waves receding from the beach in
front of the Herbert Samuel dock, to return, bleeding, to the coffee
machine.
In 1984, after despairing ad nauseum of the smell of gun-oil and the odor of hashish that followed, I dove into
symmetry studies at the Herzliya’s polytechnic. First as a free listener, then
as a fulltime student.
Symmetry and its various expressions, calmed me down and its beauty
captivated me. I will not forget that day in the
laboratory when my teacher cut a twisted model of the Möbius strip and the infinite, enclosed perspective that cascaded, translucent,
from the Klein bottle.
For 14 years, I studied permutation symmetry. I explored the sacred radial
wave symmetry up to the revered pentaradial
symmetry of the starfish, the crystals conforming
to a hexagonal six-fold radial symmetry and the dual radial symmetry of
gambling that maintains the same image through gain and defeat. I dove into
reflection symmetry and its amalgamation with the wonders of indentation, that
is the ability to remain constant when the world changes.
There, for the first time, I discovered the mathematical possibility of a-principia as a doorway.
Later on, I read that Pierre Curie who
was hit by a carriage (The Kabbalist Working of the Chariot! The Mahāyāna!) hurrying through a muddy street, tried to phrase it and
what lays beyond it. An impossible task, of course.
The wonder was not just in the fact that there is an opening. a gate, but
also in the fact that it created the Wall and it created the opening. A
complete realization of symmetry.
The action of passing through required ignoring the doorway itself as fee
to the principle of symmetry causing me severe headaches until I learned to
gamble and skillfully lose my memory to touch that which cannot be encapsulated
by formulating letters.
Present day mathematicians describe symmetry as a finite group of
transformations, so that a
couple of these infinitesimal transformations give rise to a third
infinitesimal transformation of the same kind. Every shape has its unique symmetry group. This way, all
types of symmetry can be described mathematically, reciprocated naturally by a
blindness whose mirth surpasses the thinking brain.
I was joined on the beach by a friend who practiced law. For a morning
hour, on the beach, we balanced and turned to one mathematic element. Without noticing, we built our own group. The sea´s fabric changed in the mornings and
with the seasons. Ever since Salvadore Dali lifted the water´s blanket to glimpse
underneath it, we have not stopped doing so, discovering creatures and the
terrifying textures of the deep. The
great movement pulsated and we saw it running under the watery cover to the
shells in the sand and under our feet, flooding and passing through us, shaking
the ground. At times, dark images of the order of Hashashiyan appeared and disappeared into
transient light waves with their democratic victims. There were always people
searching for rings and coins lost in the shallow waters, nude women, and moist
dogs running with squashed plastic bottles in their mouths.
After the daily practice of the complicated model, we sat
down to drink the bad coffee, diluting its flavor in cold water. The lawyer
smoked Dunhill from a red box with gild letters. His face wrinkled and skin
freckled. When he smoked, his face would turn somber and focused as he looked
inwards to the wall until the cigarette died and he joined the people marching
on the sand. When I looked at him, I heard the big engines of the fighter jets
he flew years ago. Then, at the moment the airplane lifts its beak, slowly
losing its awareness of its weight, he is crucified to the seat at the brink of
the acceleration by metal, fire and ally bonds. A minute window appeared in the
wall, a vacant, liberated flight of great love. Joy fused to horror. But as
soon as he sailed in the clear medium, he turned and joined the large structure
and netted cruises of communication systems sounds and passwords. For years he took off to the singular,
instantly-evaporating moment and then, he stopped; turned his head, trying to preserve
a miniscule, luminous, faded memory with sobbing smoky suckles, and ignore the large,
partially sunken, lump of memory of uniforms and orders and gunfire and glimpses
of a gyrating land that dragged him downwards again in grey and brown. I want
to break free, he told me once and squashed the cigarette into the light sand.
A blueish line of smoke spiraled up and disappeared.
The next day I brought glue paper and scissors to the beach.
Tiny pebbles squeaked under or feet. I slowly cut a strip of paper out of a
double folio paper, careful not to stain it with the coffee on the low
table. What are you doing? he asked. I
want to show you a Möbius strip, I replied. I held the strip up, took its
bottom edge, twisted the strip once and taped it to the other edge. The
resulting ring created a coiled circumference. The sharp edges of the paper
made me think about the snail that can safely slither on a blade. Watch, I said
to him. I started cutting the strip in the middle lengthwise. The paper’s
circumferences grew further apart like two rings in the silence of the hot air.
The final blades closure remained. Watch, I said, waiting. He observed with
concentration as I closed the blades and the two rings twisted into one paper
loop double in size. He inhaled with wonder.
For a while I stared at the elliptical space encircled by the
thin paper strip that quivered in the breeze over a small puddle of coffee on
the table’s wooden top. Let’s continue, I said. Again, I started splitting the
big loop’s length. Oh, he said, his
consciousness now wide willing to expand further, there will be an even large
ring now. I continued cutting in silence
till the final blades’ movement. Look, I said. He watched with a combat pilot’s
concentration. I closed the blades as the circumferences dropped softly to the
side, two entangled rings, entrapped into each other, reaping his consciousness
that waited to expand with the circumference, with a convoluted deception. When
he laughed, I laughed with him letting go of the paper strips that slowly fell
to the sand, spiraling like smoke in horizonal eights. Beatings of helicopter
blades in the infinite distance.
For the entire last year on the beach we practiced complex
symmetries in an attempt to slide through the opening in their center. One foggy morning, a tall, thin women from the
FSU marched southwards on the sand in a short young girl´s dress. Legs bare and
skinny, knees scratched, Italian heal-length boots. Her white shirt stained
brown and grey covered by a short jacket. Swaying forcefully with each step a
square shopping bag. Hair sticky and fair, her face covered by a horrific
multitude of red plague lesions. The five-year-old wall wounding her flesh like
painful barbwire, her world reciprocating her trapped generosity with rape of
hunger and disease. Seeing us practice, she burst into a beaten child´s
laughter, covering her mouth with her hand. You… the sounds said, passing like
smoke through the gap, so silly…. I have found…. Soon. The walls of clouds
fleeting around us silently closing us in again. Sharp shreds of seashells laid
on the beach.
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