THROUGH A VAIL OF TEARS
to see that which had long sunk into the shades of memory.
[in collaboration with Avital Gourary & Omer Michaelis]
Our eyes are organs for seeing,the site of vision and clarity.But they are also the organs through which we weep, the site of tears. Not only "for" seeing clearly, but also "for" crying. If only for a moment, the control over vision – over our visionary being – is overwhelmed and overcome.
When rooted, through crying,in sensibility,in the body of felt experience,in,therefore,an experience of our interconnectedness with other beings, vision can see the ethical humanity of others, can see their presence, without the corrective mediation of judgment. An always already ethical relationship with the other that is revealed through an upswell of tears, a spontaneous responsiveness to the presence of the other as another human being that precedes and grounds the constitution of the epistemological relationship. And it is out of this responsiveness that ethical responsibility for the other can emerge and be cultivated, but only if it is deeply and securely rooted in this experience of interconnectedness, and stays in touch with its roots. It is when our vision is uprooted, detached from our sensibility and of our capacity for feeling,that it becomes blind and loses its ethical bearings, falls into an abyss.
Approaching the Veil of Tears, we approach that which will neither enable us clear sightedness of a field of distinct objects, nor will abstract us, eyes-closed, from our sentient bodies. Gradually, our sense of sight and our visual field becomes attuned to the structure, gaps and challenges of memory. As fragments of memories, sight flickers, emerges from nowhere and everywhere. There is no middle distance, no perspective, no outline; nothing the eye can cling to except thousands
of smoky plumes of light.
We are encouraged to participate in and experience, in the routine of the present,this cry that strives to reach us without any sound, to be aroused by the gesture of memory. The Veil of tears breaks the vertebrae of our time and makes of this fracture a meeting place, or an encounter between times and generations.
The memorial situates you not in a pedagogic situation, but in a never ending process of recollection, of passing through a field of emerging horizon in thickening silence.In front of the ever humming ocean in front of us, a key to sight and recollection had changed. Not of the order of the representable, but through sensation and expression, a tear had burst. Coming from the flow of the ocean, leaving its traces as it seeks it back.
