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the thought on a train ride fro m Ben Gurion airport to Beersheba ,
and then editing it some ten years later .
I embarked upon my '07 trip choosing the route that required a
stopover in a European city, thinking the artistic history of the cit y
would live in the walls of Paris . I believed that I would feel a n
inspiration like experienced by the art masters . Again parallel
universes, my first trip to Israel was in 1973 , a maiden journe y
towards the fulfillment of the drea m that Israeli Jewish
nationalis m had returned fro m exile after two thousand years. The
only image I had of Israel was learned at the age of 9 years old
while a student in Hebrew School. Eleven and thirty-three years
later I can flash to a script of society everywhere denuding
resident citizens of their humanity; the heart of the Paris barely
throbbing and hardly discernable, Israel of the ancients but a
mumble of modernity articulated in a haze of meaningless words
that could describe cities built the world round.
Not even a hint of imaginative excitement can be depicted in
the photograph of me with the Eifel Tower in the background,
which I never even showed to anyone . The picture that sticks in
my me mory is how the ho meless are impelled by their inst inct for
survival to mull slowly and cautiously through the shadows, and
at the intersection of a streetla mp see oneself at a vanishing point
distance from his toe tips. My downer night in Paris to ra mble and
roa m around the airport for the six hours re mai ning until the
awaited take-off on Air France. The security is too tight for the
homeless to roam the hygienic and well -lit lounging areas at
airline terminals, but I would have liked to invite them to join me
there. Strikingly similarity to my departure f ro m Safrascity where
I also spent the night hanging around the airport.
Herein I inscribe my procla mation that the ho meless people
overcome with Urban Aggravation are a realis m therapy to scions
of bureaucratic culture; freedom escapes configuration, ho me less
is free. Schlepping their sleeping gear in shopping baskets, some
cower in bus stops for protection from the rain, and otherwise
traversing the nighttime hollow through strea ms of public
transportation. Even though these people have no forma l
commitment to any pattern of existence, their survival is
guaranteed by forces intrinsic to nature; security is freedom fro m
responsibility. Nobody can generalize more than that, each pers o n
is alive as anyone of us. I only imagine the illusion that is a n
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