A collage of text based on texts from the book “Elyakum: The Book of Hallucinations” by Binyamin Tamuz, written for ‘THE END’ by Ana Wild, the closing event of ‘The Living Gallery’ season. Read by myself and played through a real human skull that was kept at my grandmother’s house.
One day, an illusion appeared before me, possessing no features of anything I had ever seen in my life. From where I stood, a rift suddenly revealed itself, a small opening to what is outside of the world, glittering and blinding. Drawn by a strange new gravity operating between us, I found myself compelled to take measured steps toward it.
As I began to walk, I realized that I had to pass directly through that opening. Yet, I soon learned that to truly pass through the rift, I had to shed countless layers, disguises, and garments. I needed to reach the threshold of that glittering breach entirely unburdened, freed from my resentments, my reckonings, and my dreams.
At that point in my journey toward the rift, I was not yet sure if I was truly ready to let go. These traits, even the most minute and meaningless among them, were what I used to distinguish myself from others. I feared that by casting away all those small details, people would no longer be able to tell me apart from the rest of the world.
Once I accepted these painful concessions, I realized just how utterly alone I was, in absolute solitude.
Then came a decisive turning point in my path toward the opening: I discovered that the way out lay in love. Yet, I also had to understand that this love must embrace absolute emptiness and nothingness. If I felt a love that possessed a specific object or purpose, it would once again be conditional on something outside itself, and therefore destined to fade.
I knew I might be able to love God, and through Him reach the illuminated rift. But that, of course, was impossible for me. I do not know God, and I lack the path to reach Him.
“So, whom shall I love?” I asked myself.
I recalled that once, I knew the answer. So, in that moment, my entire existence became an effort of remembering. Ultimately, the answer surfaced and revealed itself anew: Me.
But immediately, I recoiled and questioned: “What, do you love yourself that much? Are you so wonderful? Are your deeds so magnificent?”
Under the pressure of the moment, I found a forced yet quite nice answer, one fitting my state of mind and circumstance at that hour: I will love myself because I am mortal, just like any human, just like any living thing. Though I had often felt alienated, distinct, and alone, I now saw that I belonged to the eternal movement of the living things bound to endless endings as beginnings.
I knew then that I would never return to my old follies, like a dog returning to its vomit. I was finally worthy of the miracle of the glittering rift. I no longer greeted it with the arrogant half-knowledge I had greeted life, back when it tried fruitlessly to express itself to me.
And on that day, and that day alone—for the first and last time in my life I knew neither the aches of the body and mind, nor the pleasures and luxuries that had consumed my soul for so long. On that day, I embraced my own dissolution. Ready and waiting, I was drawn upward, siphoned into the opening of the transparent skies into a presence that had ceased to be terrible or threatening. It became washed in everything, embracing everything, embedded in the void of the heavens, sealed in boundless light and a silent, fathomless explosion.