Witz полностью

The purpose of this gathering’s hushed like a baby born into sin then flushed down the Nile, is to lay to suckling sleep the groundwork, in Jerusalem, for a lasting peace — and so nothing’s new under Ecclesiastes’ sun, Kohelet’s, which is as oppressive as it ever was, if only here, the shadow of its former dominion. Idea is to fix a ration of reparations to the remaining few Unaffiliated; who first need to be counted, who, Shade thinks, to receive such reparation would just love to be counted, and then and only then — it’s proposed — to get them their own nation, some small wound of bloody dreck somewhere, anywhere, to become infected, infecting…proposing to appease them, to shtum them up — to let the world get on with what it has to get on with, the Law. On the wall opposite the projection, there’s hung an extensively taut skinlike tatter, a parchment spliced then nailed as if to dry itself of slaughter in that light in from the one thin teardrop window still arcing, not yet walled: it’s a map, of the nation in question, that questionable nation, what to name it, why — partitioned wherever as an exclave, an excrescence, balmed in roughly the shape of B’s body, it’s said; that is, if you examine it squinting then sort of to the left, looking upsidedown, too, and through an obstruction, a column…Shade’s head in his hands, staring down, heedless, unhearing. What would’ve been B’s bodyparts: organs, glands, and yadda in that vein, leeching fourcolored inside these black borders some thick with others dotted as if for future severance, all sectioned then labeled with the names of the assembled, and to him the President what’re inexplicable numbers, indicating spheres of influence, responsibilities, domains of empire imminent only in their destiny, never to manifest…His forbiddenaround, tabooedabout hindquarters, there at the sinew of the thigh marked thickly in red with the term Undecided as if expecting, or provoking, a fight with any angel that would deign to sponsor; His heart’s hachures bearing the name Shade in black, His heart that is itself a Shade, which name is shadowed, too, under the tongue and then upon the forehead, marking due north toward a border that’s going to prove a problem, a pain in the international tush that’s labeled across the entirety’s lakelike middle Abulafia (its southern extremity, though, also marking the ocean, and so they’d be controlling what would be this country’s major port and largest city), a solution to which’ll probably eventuate even more death and, what’s worse for Shade, another invitation to a meeting amid the rooms of this scorched soaking Jerusalem tomb, yet another convocation of this body, and their seconded, protracted session of parceling His — this legislating of it parsed, skinned and grown then shed — this body that’s to be His not much longer, which will become as foreign to Him and to us as will be that makeshift nation to any, to be grafted onto the spine of whichever continent so deserves it, would deserve if only. And if, ultimately, amid all these arguments, these questions unanswered because still and forever unasked, unproposed, a solution can’t be found, and soon, by eventuality’s timetable, which is wellappointed, placecarded, and centerpieced, too, with Sinai’s two tablets, with the settings around them in place for first seating and already amply spread with the dew — listen, there’s always Shade’s solution, which is final, enough. Intifada. Plan B. It remains a Shem unnaming, however, this thirdtablet silence — for now not a label, placard, or scrap, but a gag. Hands are shook. If only in hope. All arches, their gates and their avenues, remain open.

The Arch

In the beginning as in its end — though Maimonides the Rambam might deny one — we are told Without form and void, and we listen, we respond, we repeat, Without form and void, generation after generation, Without form and void, generation Without form, generation And void…though we might add, if only now, forever late in a latening time, that it’d been soft, too, and as warm and as wet as a womb. Then the pressure from within, and then that from without, as substance separated and those separations separated; all was already old, existenced deeply. A mouth was forming, a mouth in the making — an arch. Then, the waters were divided into waters down here, waters up there, the waters were rent, the wet ripped, and hardness ensued, hardnesses, and we say — Darkness was upon the face of the deep…