Textual Cuts

Sami Berdugo

Translated from the Hebrew by Janice Weizman

• It is as if I am not present. The sources of the man I am—myself, the Israeli place—have been lost. For this reason I request that you refrain from again mentioning the name of the country and the linear sequence of letters with their different inflections, because my will does not allow me to remain outside of her borders. Up till now it seems that the unraveling has vanquished every challenge of attaching. But I know that my interest lies not in the rejection of the place and its historical admonishment, but rather in that very same state of being not-found. Therefore, in spite of it, with an uneasy heart I ask, is the regional environment taking its toll on my soul and intellect? And the one who does not involve himself with the political and geographical issues of the place he lives in—is a fate I have no adequate word to describe still imposed upon him? The remainder of humanity does not share my own visions; they are deprived of unexpected perspectives. Consequently, these people annoy me by their acceptance of the local spirit of things, by their regarding the uniqueness of their conduct as being superior to that of others, conduct that is far from here, and definitely not its equal. But how strange it is to realize that they themselves cannot see that their own language often invalidates and illuminates their error. They belittle language. It happens when an individual and many like him connect, in a virtual bridge, that which is here with that which is there, insisting on creating the semblance of a household, of a pretentious economy, and especially the semblance of social attachments based on the mechanism of internal non-conversation.

• My full name devastates me. It is hard for me to say if I deny it, or if I accept it in its entirety. The name is related to the sculpting of the body and the creation of the meaning of the self—not as they were determined by the cruel people who gave birth to me, but in that I am the one who decides and demands the name that is within me. A local and non-local audience is only partly guilty of its one-sided view of who I am not. My birthplace, the color of my skin, the language spoken, property, and all the rest—these are all products of contemporary gazes, not of face-value eyesights. To my great dismay, the society that gazes at me and claims me for itself depends on a not-lengthy history of paltry mistakes lacking in content. Therefore I do not try to deviate from the meaningful assertion of the name.

• Is it possible to talk about the universality of place without remembering my belonging to it? I would like to perform the act of cutting across it. I would ask that the act of cutting be judged in and of itself, and not because I was compelled to do it. Once, for example, when I was riding toward a certain central region on a train that moved from a city I visited in the north, at the moments when I passed the scenic horizon of the blue-grey sea that appears and disappears, while my gaze compulsively scanned the outskirts of cities and the apartment buildings that grow to wrongful height—then I managed to move beyond the visible borders of this country and see a man a little like me, very far from my moving spot, who is also sitting on a train on his way to an improved village that had not yet been harmed by the progress of cultural and transport technology like that which, let us assume, can be found in the urban station where he boarded. But now that man is in the station of the suburban region, getting off the train, and very soon he will begin to descend the stairs to the tidy and humid path, and he will not be bothered by even the coldest air. There, a man who is connected to him will collect him. As he walks he will surely be filled with restlessness, partly because of the man who is coming to collect him and who is linked to him in some fairly complicated relationship, perhaps an intricate relationship. As for me, as the coach bursts into the dominating urban space, I complete the act of cutting. In this way I continue to see, and mainly to know, that that same man, who is now being driven to a house that is dense and dark in a way that is not to my usual taste, is not about to pass tranquil and spacious hours inside it. There, like here, with my leaving my coach, as I approached and ascended the escalator, the conclusion reached its destination; the nature of world geography does not leave its mark on the creation of the wounds of the hour. Although I must admit that after this realization the lowliness of this environment still protests within me.

• I am often saddened as the weekend approaches. Time and place gather into moments of respite. They enable me to examine my existence within them. What is this urban hour? On one side it is the street and the occurrences that take place in the area I am sentenced to live in, to live with. Or was it decided that it would contain me? This hour is a place that is familiar to people who, like me, can reduce its value and perceive it as something obvious. I am angry with myself for wandering here and for failing to understand that this “here” does not offer protection to my detested birthplace, from which I fled. Hebrew utterances and car traffic mark my nearby local and un-extinct environment. This is the time that each day defeats our ability to understand that there are no other occurrences for humans. The trap of the failure of understanding leads to the other side of that hour (usually five in the afternoon). I cannot manage to descend to the depth of its other side, but its outstanding characteristic indicates an objection within me. Is there anyone like me who is prepared to sail, at this exact moment of halting, into a non-Jewish space? Then I understand the extent to which the chains of nationality imprison me. They set anchors for me, and I cannot manage to remove them. Worst of all is that the practice and habit subdue the attempt to succeed, and it is no longer about the possibility of escape at all, but rather about my remaining in the geographic space that is unlike any other, from every point of view.

• The urban territory tries to return me to an awareness of being that is present here, and I am saddened because of this awareness, and perhaps also because of the territory. Again and again the pains of loss are portrayed in my thoughts, and the collapse of everything that is possible takes shape. I am no longer asking, why do not you get up and do something that will do you good? How did it happen that you are a witness, at this very moment, to the creation of the severing, and the deepening of the non-belonging? Why do you not stop this incident? What is this destruction? What is its source? Sometimes I am disappointed to think that it is in this way that I am assimilated into the community that took root in the regions of the country, spread up and down, and that is also assimilated into the present time. I read a book and discover that I have nothing to do with it. It is joined with other writings. Beside the small window I pause and hear through it the whispers of the people in the building opposite me. At this point I stand and wait for the voice to disappear. Without knowing why, I observe how the history of uninvited people horrifies the vital continuity of man, when it is obvious that it is he who is at a pivotal point in the story of his years, looking back at those that were used up, and at the same time envisioning their continuation, all of them, and they cannot be changed. This is precisely the real and simple cruelty that fosters the victory of the grand destiny.

• First these two sentences appeared:

“The general mood of our place is not good.”

“I repeat to two people that I feel a sense of discomfort.”

I have not yet found a suitable connection or attachment for these two sentences that will serve as a high-quality continuation which will create coherence. Even so, my simple consciousness reports that it is impossible for them to stand on their own. Therefore I am attaching something that is not their natural continuation. It is written as follows:

The man whose loss I embody without making an attempt to bring him back, that is to say, to house him in the pages of the book of Chronicles which are etched with his exclusive story. There are, in this story, totally non-specific people; there are streets that are only partly impersonal, a closed dwelling is joined to them, memories of the sight of countless deviant habitats, souls that desire themselves, and also current evening dinners and a weakening of the body. I wonder, are these more common in the eastern Mediterranean? And furthermore, what is the opposite of loss? It might be that which is. If I am not lost, then I am found. Yet my being present is a report of my being lost. What leads me to know this experience? Precisely those misguided souls who are currently explaining their righteousness to me. My immigrant parents and the home that they established also create it. The school I attended and the language I acquired condense it. The place of the middle easternness opposite the remaining continents and seas increasingly intensifies the state of being found, which has not stopped disappearing. Unfortunately I now recognize the spread of disappearance, like a devouring plague that causes me to forget my identity. If this is so, many factors do not allow me to understand where I step in the city, or in the rented apartment in which I live.

• The classroom is the most suitable framework for the annulment of the learning to which it aspires. The classroom, especially in these parts, must preserve its four walls, so as to encourage those who enter it, to unite them in an organized and precise fashion, to allow a little extra time for the entrance of late comers, and at the same time refuse entrance to law-breaking infiltrators of any kind, those who might harm its exalted separateness. (There will always be those who will try to upset it manually.) For all of these reasons, the classroom is very important—mainly because it is the place in which the things that are truly necessary will be learned only by means of the learners themselves, while the exalted teachers will be of much assistance, without their knowing it. In this way the best lesson will emerge. In my childhood, and also in my youth, I imagined the classroom as home, a house of a unique sort that had the characteristics of one’s parents’ home, where one sleeps soundly, because there, forever, it seems that your development is incubated. To the singularity of this home one must add the quality of a place that is wide, high, and large, whose fiction enables one to soar with the passion of one’s heart to the realization of the dangerous areas of creativity. In this way the lessons will bear fruit. My affection for the classroom returned mainly on rural winter days, that outside were actually moshav-like, and they were what partly enabled the proper establishment of the classroom. Something in non-urban, almost anti-urban, communities causes the occurrence of learning to search for its essence. The closed nature of the place—its separateness—refines the ignorance, and the classroom is the autonomous unit in which amateur thoughts about the world and its customs collapse and create movement, perhaps future movement. As I entered the classroom, warmth enveloped me and I wanted to withdraw into myself and burrow inside it, even though the approaching hour of the lesson, together with the other learners, hid seeds of fear within me. The enveloping inner walls, the particular darkness that was always present, the low chair and the writing table, served as an echo of some private room, and it seemed to me that in spite of the danger of invasion from outside, no one would breach the sealed space. There were many hours when I listened to what was said in the class, and I inscribed within myself my knowledge of it. That was the wonderful thing: the meeting of the words spoken with those that seemed to be spoken inside me beforehand. A classroom must preserve its prestige. Even today, inside the classrooms I visit, there still remains the thing that chains their square structure together with the chosen-learners, who are, after all, trapped in it against their hidden will. Nonetheless, another magical thing happens at these moments: the classroom itself is also imprisoned and captive in our, the learners’, grip. In this way the fusion of the building with human beings takes place, and the germination of a fine creativity in its truth is created.

• My love of art has lost interest. It is not my love that has gone, but art itself. Its extensive products are now clearer than anything to me. The secret of its charms has disappeared, and I assume that it is related to the inability of the creative act to speak for itself. Why does it no longer speak? As I walked down a crowded street yesterday afternoon, clarity snuck up on me. I tried to dispel it when my eyes were trapped, against my will, in the clusters of the walking and the standing, most of whom were, for some reason, confident and sturdy brutes. In the face of their striding confidence and that of the other females who were not passersby, clarity already came without imposing itself. It was no longer forcing itself on me, and the moment I was about to enter the rented apartment, the desire to express it in any form dropped away. Here again, awareness of that which is most clearly understood comforts my heart. I try to sharpen the loss of interest, and discover art to be too easy. Our access to it is paved. More than anything else, its representation expresses accessibility, and the entire act rises in my eyes like a hanging portrait of a particular situation. What is so bad about a portrait? For there are plenty of successful portraits in the age-old aesthetic tradition. One must try to understand that the contemporary portrait of the particular artistic situation tells me only of its own fixation, of its inability to emerge from within itself, the pleasant comfort in which there is only the view of the outcome, and it is that which can approach me one-sidedly, and also leave me one-sidedly. Stability quickly disappoints me, so that my love remains unfulfilled. The conduct of passersby in the street is similar to this. Just as they meet my eyes at a random crosswalk, objectifying me, and I them, presenting to me the display of their external layer, this is how the artistic act behaves as it immortalizes its obvious temporariness. There is nothing worse than when all things are taken for granted. Lately I wonder if emptiness in the case of art is the emptiness that has been created within me. The loss of love might indicate the drying up of desire in my body. When I walk upon the floor of the apartment, barefoot in underwear and a shirt, I feel as though that original longing is evaporating, the one that I sensed in the past with great emotion, while the homeland created conscious art, and also art that was made, consciously, through knowledge.

• Where in my life have my thought processes changed? When did it happen that there was a change, and self-knowledge (independent knowledge) turned against me? Before I try to isolate the incident I must hesitate a little in case thought is connected with seeing. It is clear to me that there is a separation between them, though when I think something I also see it. There is something else that I know: while I write about a local thought that is not good (because there is no point in writing a good one) I loosen something from the grip of the moment, I release the obvious connections and contexts, and all in all I rely entirely on the seed of the idea, which allowed me to move further ahead of it, even much further. Therefore, the seed of the idea of thought is needed, but I discover that the lucid and causal character of thinking itself disrupts its improvement and development. On the other hand, when I see a bad thought I do not release it, and the image that appears within me is perfect and complete. Now I begin to spin it—and with it—matters and things, and I am able to follow its details easily, and also to examine the necessary connections between one and another. In this way it seems that something about thought causes me discomfort, and a particular shallowness settles inside me, so that I want to be more and more careful each time that I write, “I am thinking.” I wonder about all of this as my eyes look out the big window into the high space of the whitened roofs of the city, whose daylight in summer afflicts me lately only because I can infer from it how wonderful it is, and my question remains hanging—is it only here this connecting separation can happen to me?

And that was the case; if not for the eyes that saw the exhausted local environment that settled within me, it probably would not have existed. Here, this is how my head turned: I want to describe the singular moment, to give an example of change (even though it is not precise to call it “an example”). There is, in the moment, a particular territory, and that moment had its own characteristics, which have become possible: I was there, and others, who were somewhat close to me, were not. Their absence is what made a big contribution to my new point of view, which distracted me from the general, direct view. What caused this moment to appear? My youthful maturity certainly did not influence the process. Neither could the youths in my vicinity, that is, it was not really the combination of them together with that place, which in fact we did not share. If this is the case then I must identify another source of the change. I reconstruct my sitting pose on the ground: my legs are crossed Eastern style, it is an evening at the beginning of the summer, the view is green and shaped by a family that belongs to a pioneer-settlement courtyard, not to a community courtyard. An appearance of the youths unfolds before my eyes until the other appearance comes, the appearance of that time, which turns the boys and girls into actors in my private reality, a reality that is clearly also theirs. Suddenly my eyes perceive the way in which the bodies of the youths behave before the world, and also toward each other, how they speak without noticing that the words split off from them, severing themselves from the evening and its events. A great blow lands inside me as the rest disappears, until the pervasive chatter and even the music that whispers at mid-volume in the air of the manicured lawn are completely sealed. It was a rift. The uniform, smooth screen of the wall of my visible thoughts split into two. The first part was the incidence of everything that is not me. Actually, everything there became a game. The strange thing was the fact that it was obvious to me how, for those who were playing the parts of youths, the event was not artificial, but genuine and completely authentic, while I, at the other side of the real world, still sitting with crossed legs, watching the double sight: theirs—and mine, which saw them all too clearly. Because there, in that time and place, I managed to isolate the speech and body movement of those who continued to perform in entire seriousness before me (whose voices also become, at an unleisurely pace, silent). This is the moment where I identify a circle with a distinct radial frame, within which is the world’s present, enacting its truthfulness; words are spoken there, music is heard, summer clothes are adorned on developing bodies, light contact is made between one and the other, and everything whispers movement of voice and chatter, all of this all-togetherness cannot at all (is not able to) deviate from the limit of the circle that is very clearly sketched in the presence of my eyes. At this point my thought breaks through and it is as if I am pushed back. My seated position might prevent things from toppling me. In this way, the event playing out before me on the circular stage is in fact happening inside my space, I contain it, a witness to that particular gap, and slowly I start to feel the double pictures, meaning I do not think about why the youths behave this way on a summer Friday night in a place that is impersonal and so beautiful, but I understand that this is the only way that they can exist, and this understanding leads inside me to the feeling that becomes decisive. I do not want, at the moment, to go deeper into the contents of the double sight, but rather to investigate the terrible process after which the world order changed.

• My talents, in other places, would destroy my weaknesses. I hereby prosecute place’s crime. Later, I will prosecute my own crime. I have in my hand some rather clear proof: I collect my thoughts, I mark my physical ability, how I appear externally—and I know to say that if not here, I would be not-weak.

• I served appetizers in the capital city, in a fairly prestigious apartment building, in a pastoral neighborhood. I was young, but unripe thoughts nested in me like a dainty anchor, planted deep in the sea floor. That was how it was during all those evening hours in the capital, and the thing that I am most sorry about is that I did not internalize the festive mood as it deserved. I came to that space in order to earn a living. I carried one tray and another from the open kitchen into the wonderfully displayed salon. At the time, I thought myself lucky to be there. The invited guests properly chatted, and it seems to me that soft music floated, so transparent, in the space of the almost-magnificent apartment. Most of the people were men of the Enlightenment and they were the ones that disfigured and cut down my knowledge. The appropriate logic that I possessed was abandoned in the corner, where it wanted to end. There was a moment in that well-chatted night when I looked out the window at the beautiful view—one that is apparently only possible in a worldly capital city with a non-homogeneous population—whose beauty I impaired the moment I came across it. My eyes found it difficult to endure the combination of the place with the properly-hosted guests, and my feeling was one of how distanced enlightened wisdom is from the low country outside, not for the view that was increasingly damaged by my sophisticated eyes, but because of the sloping streets that turned west to the sleepy neighborhoods that were not exposed to the eyes of the visitors to the bourgeois apartment. More than anything I wanted to be accepted into the suburbs of the capital and truly emerge from there. I was sorry that the appetizers tasted good and I listened occasionally to someone who spoke about communication, and how he related his statements to a thinker from the eighteenth century. I remembered the name of the thinker, and this was before my own knowledge was severed, before I was compelled to connect it to the current era of the capital and the place that it represented at the time. At that point, I also had not sharpened my thoughts into a combination of the three: a horrible time, a faulty location, and people who are not molded into them. Now I am saddened by this. My heart regrets that the insight escaped me, and it is very difficult to bring it back.

• I was on Ziv [Brightness] Street in the central city of the country. But on Ziv Street there was no glow. For a short time a man was with me there who wanted to speak about cities and villages in North Africa. He mainly demanded a focus on Algeria. I looked upon him with compassion and could not cry instead of him. His particular misery lost out to the successful location of Ziv Street. Yet my interest is not in this man who left the area shamefaced but rather in my advantage, which was present there and which signified the most scathing proof of all of the baseness and arrogance within it. Why does Ziv Street seem so respectable? A woman, fairly old, walked along it and entered a fine apartment building. Why is it good and appropriate that she should be exactly the right woman to make a somewhat elegant entrance into this type of home? I sat on a low stone wall and designated myself an observer on Ziv Street. I believe that minutes passed, and then a young couple appeared, got out of their clean and elevated silver car, and collected a long, thin girl whose hair was too light and straight. They too were about to go into their own building, but I could not bear this future, so I looked the other way. I felt an unfamiliar strangeness. On the one hand, I was sorry to be in such a place, but on the other hand, I was glad that I was seeing it as it is; that is, I felt as though I was privileged to be its historian of that moment, one who heralds the fact of its existence and the fact of the everyday lives of its inhabitants, as a non-exclusive existence, a most creaky existence, that wounds as a result of its very lack of pretension to declare how very good it is. What is it about this central and tranquil place in this city? Why has my country allowed an area like Ziv Street? It must be admitted that the trait of friction is missing here, and so, as a place it lacks high-quality The way the road blends into the sidewalk, alongside a line of greenish trees and the light-colored buildings whose almost uniform height seems to declare an aesthetic symmetry worthy of living in—these signify, more than anything, the smooth weave of populated life, and one must know that it is not just seemingly smooth. Because even if it is possible to speak of a certain shrillness within the apartments themselves on Ziv Street, the ambition of the place and its people is the exterior of the street itself, for all its distortion, such that no single pothole can be found there. Who was here first? The planners of the city itself or the land which, in time, crystallized into a display without deviations or cracks? Ziv Street did not cast me out. That man who spoke about that arid and distant area in Africa was himself cast out, and he was proud to immortalize his wretchedness. I did not want to tell him that he was expelled like a foreigner. I do not know if I was sorry that he was thrown out, and I was disappointed for him because he went from here to, of all places, our country’s capital, where he lives. And I, only after turning left from Ziv Street at a not-late hour of the evening, and arriving at the tumultuous main street, continued walking a long way to my rented apartment, repeatedly pressing on the mechanism in my head in order to disperse from myself the character of that man (who was quite handsome, and so I did not understand why he was not focusing and perhaps using his appearance to promote himself, which could have been of help to him on Ziv Street). As I settled in my non-private apartment, a great revulsion rose in me toward urban centrality, and my desire to destroy the entire structure heightened my frustration, and then I sat down on a chair and managed to stop the suffocation, until tears sprouted from my eyes, accompanied by a voice. I broke down for a short time, and then I rose from the chair and went to the kitchen. I was filled with pain and sadness about the fact that pain and sadness occurred within me at all. My state of affairs was too hard to bear. By the stove I picked up the dishrag and a moment before I put it on my face, my feelings stabilized because I imagined the ruin of Ziv Street, and I recovered and returned to survey the disturbed territory of our local time, which seemed to arise before me amongst the crowded streets of the city, together with the ugly cars that were crammed between them and in them.

• If suicide happens (to me) it will be because of the grievance of what is made possible in our place. I know someone who is forty-four years of age and he works laying floors in the center of the country. Many years have turned him into an expert. Our friendship is not close, partly because he hints about his disappointment with life. Like me, he is a practical man. Lately, he causes me to compare my situation to his. At the moment, my ambition is great and I have not yet given in to the urge to shut it down, even though my mind is signaling to me that the national space is repeatedly mistaken in disdaining the stories that have nothing to do with literature and history. I would like to tell someone about the possible act of suicide and in this way leave him heavy-hearted with the legacy of knowledge. I sense that in time, that someone will struggle in place of me for my place, do it with forethought, and he will insist on the custody of realistic vision, shout about all those things that are made possible, and maybe will not succeed in his mission. In the meantime, the need to cover my eyes rises within me, precisely because of my sharp-sightedness. I feel that the floor-layer grieves for his common and cultural, but not his professional, fate. We both have no chance of relying on each other. That is how it happened that my heart dried up when I found myself, reluctantly, in an urban and polished store that sold materials that belong to the margins. I want to clarify: these margins are steamrollers of power; they are the intensifying output of all that does not contain any of the worthy spiritual values. I was angered at the sight of the insignificant surplus, which was mainly trade without representation. How terrible it is that it is not possible to connect any sort of object with the human being who made it. The products in the store were not made from an original, and furthermore, they were proud of their detachment. They embodied a great burden. I saw very well how the semi-tumultuous square rustled and exhibited with a hypocritical aesthetic all that is not cultural. I knew that the visitors to the store enable its existence, and for a moment I was even confused about who was doing whom a favor. Further on, at another area of stores that was not even in the city, I was again exposed to the exhaustingly available merchandise that was entirely redundant and marginal, like the remnants of the craftwork of an artist in his workshop immediately after he has perceived their non-existence and discarded them in the presence of the thing that he has just finished polishing with his heart’s blood. In that shopping area I did not dare ask why you suppliers and customers are like that. I now understand that we have a systematic mechanism that has taken root in us for at least three generations. I am sometimes disturbed by the race that is assigned to me, and I again bring up suicide, the end of the trail of the temporary native. Its enabling has not yet matured, and I am doubtful that the floor-layer will make it happen. Maybe because the hard manual labor that chafes his skin prevents the inner level from rising. I cannot say whether being occupied in making a living is a comfort to him, leveling floor tiles in urban apartments and suburban homes that are losing the natural neighborhoods they once had, because after all, he does it out of necessity. But something in his mediocre earning potential, at certain hours of the evening, on Friday afternoons, brings him to sit and sketch, in crude words, the blueprint of the right possibility for himself. He does not write well, and his letters are stubborn. In disorganized sentences he describes how he would like to see his life, how he thinks of raising a family in a not-so-central area of the country. In the written words he ornamentally expresses his affection for a walk in a green and brown landscape that can be found in several valleys of this homeland. For some reason he has a desire to meet political figures who are long gone, he even invents a conversation with them, asks a question and allows the great man, as far as he is concerned, to say a lot about what quality is and how one can obtain it here, of all places. I was a little surprised when he mentioned a very well-known author in one of the pages. But he did not converse with him; rather, he withheld two pertinent questions, and only described that author walking down an unknown street, and also sitting crossed-legged on a sofa in his private apartment, waiting for something he was not expecting at all. The floor-layer once wrote that the author shares his narrative idea with him. I remember that the floor-layer took the written papers from me then, he actually grabbed them from my hand and gave me a sad smile. The sadness overtook the smile.

• I thought that the man who approached me at the beginning would agree that I go to the kernel of my ambitious thoughts. I wondered if he would be able to handle that exciting question that is awaking in me, because its heart is sharp-edged but round in its essence, absolutely lacking in protuberances. I am still extremely careful not to write explicitly what I would like to happen. To write it might also expose the lack of seriousness of the idea, the shallowness of the matter, which I fully admit, contains something of these attributes. They might have been created from this “something.” And still the question disturbs me. And again I ask, really ask, for over a week now, will the man who approached me agree to listen and allow me to declare the new situation to which we must aspire? It is mainly one single word that rolls on my tongue, but I will not be able to pronounce it now. Here the danger of criticism, or the lack of halachic criticism, is expressed with relation to those contemporary founders who are lacking in our time. How can we look at what is here if there is nothing before us, that is in front of us, with us? I find that the great failure of those of the present generation is that they are not interested in preserving the present. The geo-political place is constantly and mercilessly disturbed, and so it too does not allow the present to be preserved. Humans that we are, we do not notice that only the past pursues us, pins us to itself. To be the victim of an era is to nullify every moment in it. I regret that I am prey of the terrorized era. The man who approached me hesitates when I hint to him about it, and he too pins me down, because twice already he has reiterated that I need a chimney for my thoughts. I return unashamed to my two rented rooms that have grown old and tired with me, and with an almost repulsive effort I try to revise a fundamental sentence about local preservation (not the preservation of the time that surrounds me). What encourages me to keep on revising is the idea of provision for the future. Only if there is provision for the future will it be possible to use it for the good of all the concerns that have passed from the world.

• Now I am deliberating whether I should write something important here that is related to me, which is actually related to my unusual, though not to itself, opinion, or whether I should save it for the non-narrative narrative that deals with non-local literature. The case in point, that is, its subject, is my father. I could use the space of this paper for the benefit of the principled behavior of this man. Even if I do not tell about the important thing itself in relation to him, I will prepare a preface to the narrative future that is echoing in my head. My father was not an easy man. His absence in my life increases his presence. The terror of him strengthens my aggressive weakness. The weightiness of my father was impossible to perceive. It seems that there was no one in our local world, and also in this country, who could accept his twisted character. As an example, I will just describe the look in his eyes, which was nice and soft as anything, a look that was jumpy and smiling in a most ordinary brown, and at the same time, stabbing and violent, entirely shrunken and ready to destroy whatever was beside him, as if a full minute of pre-death was about to take place. At this moment, a character like that seems to me most ideal. This is exactly the kind of father that makes it possible for me to live today. His death at a young age did not cause me sorrow because I was at the peak of my youth. Today I recall my desire to stand beside my raging father and see how heredity, in its every aspect, proves its true nature. If a certain number of people do not have this type of father, they themselves must invent him. I wonder, what is the power of the continuation of life, what is the nature of the inter-generational chain of transfer, if there is not an essential rupture between the ancient and the contemporary? I must admit that once in a rare while, when I run into the sight of an older father and a not-young son, at a time, let us say, that they are speaking calmly, or even worse, when the father wears an expression of love and wraps his son in his arms, jealousy awakens in me. However, I discover that it is a deception by a different feeling. Jealousy is a cover for my knowledge that things do not have to be this way. I try to explore this matter and define for myself why jealousy gives way to a sense of strength that grows inside me. Why do I stop feeling jealous? Why is this apparently pleasant image of the two nullified? It is likely that its wholeness does not enable me to see either of them grow. The way the son replicates the father (and the opposite) undermines the justification for the existence of each of them. In time, I in fact sense the weakness of the two. It happens when the double sight accompanies me as I move through the network of the neighborhood streets, for example. The plane of asphalt helps me to make a crack in the picture and reveal beneath it, in its nakedness, the possible and proper life story of that father and son.