IN THE ERA OF THE BIG TIMEQUAKE. April 24, 12:30pm
Beginning a little weekly of probably failed attempts to plant from seeds and reusing fresh earth coming on organic lettuces or other vegetables delivered by Misfits. These weekly deliveries of organic unfit vegetables began thanks Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 's advise and Eléonore 's initiative. I have always loved planting and growing plants. I had a balcony in Paris (voice over imitating Meryl Streep : " I had a farm in Africa"). I don't have an outside space in Bay Ridge. Here you see me extract the seeds of a non organic strawberry with tweezers. It would be fun to document a pair of my dyspraxia doing the filling of the egg shell with the little quantity of earth grated from the lettuce roots... But it's a quandary to do my Jacques Tati thing and film myself in the same time. Having Nurith Aviv as a cameraman could help. As you may understand I'm desperate for growing plants, berries, citruses, herbs. I will go for almost any seed falling under my hand. Red peppers have so many seeds and I have a few ones, but very little fresh earth.
In fact it is not that much a practical exercise. It's why being dyspraxic is not an issue. It is a theurgical action of kavone. Yes, those who didn't read until this place will not be able to share the core of the idea. In this era of Timequake, where past and present reflect in the miror of our houses' remoteness each little practical act to feed and clean and organize life takes the dimension of a mitsve, is sacralized by the imperative of Life preserving. We live the same way we cook preserves or we bake bread or kukhn. We look for seeds to grow in an eggshell or a nutshell, we transplant the arborescence of trees into minuscule formates, as the Japanese taught us with the slow, sophisticated and beautiful art of cutting and growing and maintaining bonzais. And when we open Skype to learn from our grand-children, the levinassian face of the other somehow inverses itself creating for us and them the most sacred moment of teaching and learning through a media détourné and redirected toward an intention that was probably not involved in the technological tool it's inventors conceived. Who would guess - some around me did (mentioning my visionary friend Michel Grosman) - that grand-parents was a category soon to be eliminated by the market driven Assassins that have taken power here and there, together with the poor sent back to work in the full swing of a pandemic without protection. We have entered a new era of history which main feature may be the disruption of transmission. We Jews are maybe a little bit less threatened because of the strength of our traditions, religious and secular, but if we let the Hubrixes of the planet have the last word, we may be flooded by the Timequake.
This little text was conceived and written while preparing a vegetable soup.
Naomi Seidman, Michael Gottsegen, Joëlle Hansel, David Mazower, Vicki Brower, Roy Greenwald, Charles Yisroel, Rachel Biale, David Biale, .
