Imágenes sin asidero,

But I also feel that we may come to a new way of thinking about this whole issue in a non-dual way, even though I still don’t have any idea how to articulate it. I think there will be a big shakeup in the scientific community over this dilemma that will come out of the research itself.

IM: The idea that the basic stuff of the universe is consciousness itself is found in Vajrayana Buddhism.

FV: Yes, but the Vajrayana point of view is as one-sided as that of science. The scientists are on one side saying that evolution is the source of consciousness while the other side is saying that consciousness is the source of evolution. If you want to investigate thoroughly, you cannot hold on tight to either position.

IM: In Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World, he reports asking the Dalai Lama what would happen if science proved wrong a principle tenet of Tibetan Buddhism. The Dalai Lama answered that Tibetan Buddhism would have to change.

FV: How many scientists have you heard say the converse? Maybe meditation practice would convince the scientists that some of their principles have to change. On the other hand, the research into prereflective consciousness might make us conclude, rationally, from research itself, that this emanational point of view—that all things arise from consciousness—has some merit after all, as a good scientific explanation.

FV: You put your finger on what is still to me a big gap in our understanding, which is that funny flip-over into being self-reflective. Mindfulness practice is based on a spontaneous human capacity that is normally occluded by our evolutionary drive to solidify. But my sense is that consciousness is not just consciousness of something. It also contains an element of pure presence or pure awareness, and this consciousness is always there. So in mindfulness practice, rather than constantly engaging with objects, one discovers that little entry point into the awareness that is always present. And then you practice, practice, practice, until this presence is more thoroughly deployed.

Actually, one way of talking about this distinction is by differentiating an awareness that goes to an object, and is therefore intentional, from an awareness that is not intentional because it is just there as bare awareness, as pure awareness. We might think of it as some kind of prereflective, preconscious awareness. You sort of bring it forth from the edges into the center. How that shift happens is where the interesting questions lie for me right now. I think we have a good grip on how consciousness of the world comes about, or at least very good glimpses of it; however, consciousness of itself is still pretty much an open question.

IM: Could you elaborate on the idea that this quality of pure awareness is actually preconscious?

FV: This understanding is just beginning to surface from various research sites. It seems that the quality of awareness, the quality of presence, might not be dependent on being fully self-reflective, or on being fully able to distinguish itself or describe itself. For example, children have a very clear presence that seems not to be self-reflective. It is just as present in adults but has subsequently become bound to their “selfness.” So the question of what it is in the brain or in the body/brain that might be the support for that pure presence is a big frontier for which the study of young children may be the key. The research is still very much in its beginning stages but is moving quite fast.

IM: So what you are investigating is the pure awareness that is preconscious, and therefore also prelinguistic.

FV: Prereflective, prelinguistic, prenoetic, preconscious—all of those “pre-” terms.

IM: Which might be what, in some sense, is being touched or rediscovered in a mindfulness practice?

FV: Right. You begin to find your way into that realm of pure awareness, first recognizing it, and then becoming at ease with it.

FV: My hypothesis is that evolution has shaped human beings to disregard the basic sources of our being. We were built to forget how we were put together. Being aware of that process would make us slightly hesitant towards ourselves and our behavior. It is like a centipede looking at itself walking; it might very well become all tangled up. So we are born with a bias to pay no attention to the original sources of the self and to simply operate in the world. That is why you can have an intellectual understanding of egolessness, or anatta, while the emotional root that weaves that understanding into your life remains absent. In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is antievolutionary.

IM: Otherwise we’d be second-guessing ourselves at every moment: Who is deciding to buy a house or have a child?

FV: That’s right. Every decision would be suspect. So evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. That is what the sense of being a separate organism is all about.

I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn pieces of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

There’s a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah; it’s at the end of Tokyo Street. Near the top of the hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It’s not a cemetery.

The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city’s Cultural Center, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

It was in this Center that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time, though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

We went to visit the grave. There’s a headstone. The dug earth is still bare, and mourners have left on it little sheaves of green wheat—as he suggested in one of his poems. There are also red anemones, scraps of paper, photos.

He wanted to be buried in Galilee, where he was born and where his mother still lives, but the Israelis forbade it.

At the funeral tens of thousands of people assembled here, at Al Rabweh. His mother, ninety-six years old, addressed them. “He is the son of you all,” she said.

In exactly what arena do we speak when we speak of loved ones who have just died or been killed? Our words seem to us to resonate in a present moment more present than those we normally live. Comparable with moments of making love, of facing imminent danger, of taking an irrevocable decision, of dancing a tango. It’s not in the arena of the eternal that our words of mourning resonate, but it could be that they are in some small gallery of that arena.

In the now deserted hill I tried to recall Darwish’s voice. He had the calm voice of a beekeeper:

A box of stone where the living and dead move in the dry clay like bees captive in a honeycomb in a hive and each time the siege tightens they go on a flower hunger strike and ask the sea to indicate the emergency exit.

Recalling his voice, I felt the need to sit down on the touchable earth, on the green grass. I did so.

Al Rabweh means in Arabic “the hill with green grass on it.” His words have returned to where they came from. And there is nothing else. A nothing shared by four million people.

The next hill, five hundred meters away, is a refuse dump. Crows are circling it. Some kids are scavenging.

When I sat down in the grass by the edge of his newly dug grave, something unexpected happened. To define it, I have to describe another event.

This was a few days ago. My son, Yves, was driving and we were on our way to the local town of Cluses in the French Alps. It had been snowing. Hillsides, fields, and trees were white, and the whiteness of the first snow often disorients birds, disturbing their sense of distance and direction.

Suddenly a bird struck the windscreen. Yves, watching it in the rear-view mirror, saw it fall to the roadside. He braked and reversed. It was a small bird, a robin, stunned but still alive, eyes blinking. I picked him up out of the snow; he was warm in my hand, very warm—birds have a higher blood temperature than we do—and we drove on.

From time to time I examined him. Within half an hour he had died. I lifted him up to put him on the back seat of the car. What surprised me was his weight. He weighed less than when I had picked him up from the snow. I moved him from hand to hand to check this. It was as if his energy when alive, his struggle to survive, had added to his weight. He was now almost weightless.

After I sat on the grass on the hill of Al Rabweh, something comparable happened. Mahmoud’s death had lost its weight. What had remained were his words.

Months have passed, each one filled with foreboding and silence. Now disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later. Nothing to do today but to try to walk on the bitter waters of this nameless delta.

Gaza, the largest prison in the world, is being transformed into an abattoir. The word Strip (from Gaza Strip) is being drenched with blood, as happened sixty-five years ago to the word ghetto.

Day and night bombs, shells, GBU39 radioactive arms, and machine gun rounds are being fired by the Israeli Defense Forces from air, sea, and land against a civilian population of one-and-a-half million. The estimated number of mutilated and dead increases with each news report from international journalists, all of whom are forbidden by Israel to enter the Strip. Yet the crucial figure is that for a single Israeli casualty, there are one hundred Palestinian casualties. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives. The implications of this assumption are constantly reiterated by Israeli spokesmen in order to make them acceptable and normal. The massacre will soon be followed by pestilence; most lodgings have neither water nor electricity, the hospitals lack doctors, medicines, and generators. The massacre follows a blockage and siege.

More and more voices across the world are raised in protest. But the governments of the rich, with their world media and their proud possession of nuclear weapons, reassure Israel that a blind eye will be cast on what its defense forces are perpetrating.

“A place weeping enters our sleep,” wrote the Kurdish poet Bejan Matur, “a place weeping enters our sleep and never leaves.”

Nothing but landswept earth.

I am back, a few months ago, in Ramallah, in an abandoned underground parking lot, which has been taken over as a work-space by a small group of Palestinian visual artists, among whom there’s a sculptress named Randa Mdah. I’m looking at an installation conceived and made by her entitled Puppet Theater.

It consists of a large bas-relief measuring three meters by two, which stands upright like a wall. In front of it on the floor there are three fully sculpted figures.

The bas-relief of shoulders, faces, hands is made on an armature of wire, of polyester, fiberglass, and clay. Its surfaces are colored: darkish greens, browns, reds. The depth of its relief is about the same as in one of Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Baptistry in Firenze, and the foreshortening and distorted perspectives have been dealt with with almost the same mastery. (I would never have guessed that the artist is so young. She’s twenty-nine.) The wall of the bas-relief is like “the hedge” that an audience in a theater resembles, when it’s seen from the stage.

On the floor of the stage in front are the life-size figures, two women and one man. They are made of the same materials, but with more faded colors.

One is within touching distance of the audience, another is two meters away and the third twice as far away again. They are wearing their everyday clothes, the ones they chose to put on this morning.

Their bodies are attached to cords hanging from three horizontal sticks which in turn hang from the ceiling. They are the puppets; their sticks are the control bars for the absent or invisible puppeteers.

The multitude of figures on the bas-relief are all looking at what they see in front of their eyes and wringing their hands. Their hands are like flocks of poultry. They are powerless. They are wringing them because they cannot intervene. They are bas-relief, they are not three-dimensional, and so they cannot enter or intervene in the solid real world. They represent silence.

The three solid, palpitating figures attached to the invisible puppeteers cords are being hurled to the ground, head first, feet in the air. Again and again until their heads split. Their hands, torsos, faces are convulsed in agony. One that doesn’t reach its end. You see it in their feet. Again and again.

I could walk between the impotent spectators of the bas-relief and the sprawling victims on the ground. But I don’t. There is a power in this work such as I have seen in no other. It has claimed the ground on which it is standing. It has made the killing field between the aghast spectators and the agonizing victims sacred. It has changed the floor of a parking lot into something landswept.

This work prophesied the Gaza Strip.

Mahmoud Darwish’s grave on the hill of Al Rabweh has now, following decisions made by the Palestinian Authority, been fenced off, and a glass pyramid has been constructed over it. It’s no longer possible to squat beside him. His words, however, are audible to our ears and we can repeat them and go on doing so.

I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes From desolation to ruin from the time of Lott to Hiroshima As if I’d never yet lived with a lust I’ve still to know Perhaps Now has gone further away and yesterday come closer So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history and avoid cyclic time with its chaos of mountain goats How can my tomorrow be saved? By the velocity of electronic time or by my desert caravan slowness? I have work till my end as if I won’t see tomorrow and I have work for today who isn’t here So I listen softly softly To the ant beat of my heart….

This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect.

And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together: physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that’s where the light gets in, and that’s where the resurrection is and that’s where the return, that’s where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.