Good Morning #1, image by Anne Tardos
The Enigma of Being Jewish
1
One
throws one’s trembling body forward.
Using
gestures, one inscribes what one is saying.
Gender neutral, one is free to speak the unspeakable.
One
doesn’t speak.
Secretly, deep down inside, one musters up confidence,
plunging into the
arena of contradiction, where
pleasure and reality embrace.
One assumes that one’s therapist can unveil which sort
of neurosis one is
related
to.
After that, one joins the fight against injustice and
poverty—as one must.
2
We count
as far as we can count, yearning for infinity, eternity.
We deliver the mail, grow orchids, grow weary, grow
old, keep track of
history, consider space-time to be
a substance rather than a
direction.
We contemplate
time-reversal invariants, such as the shattered glass
cinematically reassembling itself,
landing on the table intact—the
impossibility
of which is somehow related to thermodynamics.
We find
things to say, we clarify, codify and spotify, we establish a
discourse,
we break up, we destroy, we foresee the unforeseeable,
we come to our senses.
We are
amazed, we search for knowledge, we prolong, we hang on to
pleasures,
we are afraid, we feel strange desires stirring inside us,
we make trouble.
We
produce texts. Think about what to write. We implement and follow
diversity
policies.
What
more can I say?
We
are moved by childlike innocence.
3
Never
mind the titles. They can be anything you like.
Bernadette
once offered a long, witty list of possible titles.
A list.
A
title.
A sheet of paper.
Clarice
said that living doesn’t take courage, but knowing
that one is
living,
does.
I
wonder how this is true.
4
I am standing
in front of the closed doors of the future.
I am
the outsider.
Forever
forbidden.
The
future is spreading through my limbs.
I
overflow.
I am
ashamed. I am afraid.
I
tremble, I redden, I bleed.
The
more I am afraid, the more I am hunted.
I’d be
crazy not to go crazy.
5
Making
small gestures, leaving traces.
Thrown
into language, the Algerian Jew discovers that writing takes
physical
effort.
Could
be Derrida, could be Cixous.
Not
interchangeable, but like-minded.
Not
substitutable, but compatible.
Not
alike, but attuned.
The
sunshine of Oran.
The
French context.
The
German family.
Displaced
dispersed exiled.
—Anne Tardos
New York, 2016-2017
