Shva Salhoov

Would My Face

Somewhere, at some time or other-the place in our memory is not a place and time is not time-but there and from there, from within that zone whose threshold is unmarked and hovers in the silence of its depths, squeaks a hinge. A door opens. And horror bursts forth.
The Hebrew word for horror is always linked to something visionary. Horror is a visible event, the core of which resides in its actual presence as a shadow. For well over a dozen years, Zvi Lachman has drawn portraits of poets that strive to duplicate the visionary essence of the shadow of horror. I will now primarily try to trace the impression that has accrued within me in the wake of my ongoing engagement with shadows that were and still are faces, that are and are not faces: the shadow of darkening expanses, sealed mouths, perforated eyes, seeing and unseeing, singed eyes, glittering with the light of dim charcoal.
These are faces that were never photographed and they appear before you as life drawings, as an imaginary act calling from the underworld, a place that dwells in the imagination of Zvi Lachman. The underworld of this place-its Sheol-is established and created by means of certain laws of looking and perceiving; that is, of sight and of understanding the seen, which Zvi Lachman has developed over many years as a draftsman, sculptor and painter.
The profound nature of its pictorial laws is revealed as the surface of portraits whose expressions are torn to shreds, atomized, disheveled, and can barely be identified as complete, articulate, and unified. The disfiguration of the surface that we usually define as "a face" occurs as a result of Lachman's grasp of the object-the world of things or "essences"-as a dynamic of particles, a totality, a dynamic occurring as a multi-directional entropy, as a wild, unraveling complex of contradictory and identical gestures that ceaselessly attract and move in all directions.
In the world of things, from Lachman's point of view, there is no such thing as a clear-cut, frozen moment of arrest that creates and defines the "frame"; no exact and defined boundaries exist to establish the separateness of objects. The law of appearances as a never ending movement reveals itself, according to Lachman, in its maximum acuity in the appearance of the face. And this is because the portrait is but a frayed fabric that, for a swift and severed moment, hauls to the surface from the depth of interiority or of soulfulness its burning and pulsing heart, like the heart of the very same law that unsettles everything in the world. The face is the soul, and the soul is at the heart of the wavering that impels everything from void to void. Primarily, it removes and uncovers the veil of the visible line that defines, orders, breaks and shears it, leaving behind a weight, flung from the depths like a spell.
These observations are based both on my conversations with the painter Zvi Lachman, and, above all, on my impressions of the portraits-made in the late eighties and early nineties-of the faces of Leah Goldberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nurit Zarchi, Avoth Yeshurun, Natan Zach, Elsa Lasker Schiller, and Yonah Wollach.

* * *

This spelling out of the poets' names might be thought of as giving birth to a clear magical expanse, sealed by the charcoal that turns darker and darker as it traces their faces. The names are a defensive space where whatever can be drawn together and made whole is assembled.
The names of the poets exist and are alive in a space set apart from the drawings that Lachman created from photographs of their faces; in these portraits of charcoal and darkness are knit nameless shadow-faces, whose meaning, whose scars burnt to a crisp, I am trying to speak of here.
In the second elegy of the "Duino Elegies" , Rilke writes:

If only we too could find some defined, narrow,
purely human place, our own small strip of fertile soil
between stream and stone. For even now our heart
transcends us, just as with those others. And no longer
can we gaze after it into pictures that soothe, or
into godlike bodies where it finds a grander restraint.

(from Rilke, The Second Elegy)

And so, somehow, at some time or other, the heart brims over and is crushed by the removing of trammels that otherwise keep in check the powerful forces of the shadow. Its expanse or origin, buried in gloom, is breached and rushes upon the space of light enveloping us and flings it out beyond the abyss of the concealed, darkening and viscous. There and then, horror is revealed as the flight of light from shadow toward a sealed and vanishing, lost domain.
Looking at the expressions of the charcoal portraits of poets by
Lachman, I wish to say that often the word 'horror' is nothing other than a human being's cachet, endured in its mutability and senseless plenitude. It is the existence of man when he himself is horror or shadow, in the shuttered absconding of light from his world.

Our minds don't commune
like those of migratory birds. Left behind and late,
we force ourselves suddenly on winds
and fall [...]

(from Rilke, The Fourth Elegy)

The poets' faces depicted in the portraits turn toward the site of "the fall," which is the desertion of light. There their eyes open wide. In the widening gaze turning toward the absence of light, the protective layer designated as "face" is torn away, and thus in the tatters of their falling, the shielding fabric of our features turn into a detached web of strokes; wandering marks dispersing in the heavy breath of the wind that is frightened of being uprooted and of wasting away. In the poems of the poets that Lachman has drawn you will find the same place hewn in words, stressed like black milk from Germany, like a bride whose dress is black and in tatters, like a black hand playing a violent and terrible death on the keys of a hushed silence.

A black hand with no man behind it
a black hand frightened children …
basic content controls the hand with what's darkest in the hand
most hands are not aware of it until suddenly
someone allows himself, and the brains remember …

(from Yona Wallach, "A Black Hand")

Zvi Lachman has cast his gaze toward the space of the unconscious embedded in the poetry; hither he stretches out his sketching hand and directs his gaze at the faces of the poets who whispered that space. Lachman turns their unknown faces, disclosing them to the spectator-reader who perhaps never asked to encounter this black knowledge. But now the viewer faces the darkness, standing up against it and along with it. And something, mute and silent, neither drawn nor erased. It is present as a devoured stain on thick paper covered in charcoal and sharp strokes of tangled, black webs. Webs sapped of strength, a nameless anonymous strength, as alien as a tremor in the flesh, the breath. A tremor that makes me think that this is how it is to stare into the face of the unfathomable dead. Alien, dead, a death that suddenly reveals an unforgettable sight. A sight that seeps through as an immense crumbling of the known and the familiar.
This crumbling is as inexorable as a blinding sandstorm, hastening to sweep by and to tear everything in its path; there is the void and the secret of the face has vanished, the secret of their being a singular divine seal, a seal embodying in its singularity the singleness of man's existence. The stroke of the sealed face, by means of the gesture that nets countless webs of shadow, repeatedly tears them to shreds. The drawing that depicts in this manner the blurring of the sealed life as a blotting out, as the erasing power of death, is not actually an iconoclastic drawing. The shattered portraits reveal man's deepest fracture to be an essential part of his features as a distinct, identifiable being. Such a face is the path of the anticipated vanishing when it is already present and continues in the wake of being. It goes on and winds upwards until the moment it descends as a veil of mist, as a final curtain, on the breath of life.

Not only, after late thunderstorms, the pulsing clarity,
not only the onset of sleep and, near dusk, a premonition …
But the nights!

(from Rilke, The Seventh Elegy)

A face of storm and night is revealed, somewhere, sometime, a time that is "then"-a then that endures as a continuous now, "over there": in that space of unceasing time, the soul is tempestuous as the night. This is the sealed night that suddenly opens and floats and is revealed in these charcoal portraits. Faces that are unseen and unfaced. The breath is stilled, the breath shuts its eyes. It is the fear that yawns wide like a door swinging open to the heart of the darkness. And from there extends a corridor of a long and enduring darkness. Wandering between sleep and twilight wakefulness. An unending whisper, a clear unsaid word, unspoken words. This is only the shudder that creeps forward and approaches, that is crushed and comes closer, crammed with sounds like night itself. Remnants of the heat of the sun, vestiges of the heat of the body, everything evaporates and condenses like a downpour to leap, to fall, and then it is as if the distance slams shut and the body that rebuffs the darkness, its fears, is dropped. Is dropped over the edge, into the abyss, into the flames of slumber. Into the void of the face.
For the face as a mask also serves us as a wall, a shield and a bulwark: our portrait is a sheltering, godly seal extended toward the other in order that he see himself in us, his individuality, his claim and desire to live and his need for protection and compassion. The dropping of the bulwark, which is the seal of the portrait, which is its limits establishing it as a screen and a merciful mask, is the deep response to the claim of death beating at the heart of the wish for life. This claim breaks through the boundary's demarcations. Faces without boundaries that aren't faces and aren't portraits. If so, what are they?
This eruption of the lineaments of the face I wish to describe as the eruption of their disclosure as a face. From there, from the depth of the fall and its ongoing downward and inward turning plunge, rises and erupts the vanishing of faces. As against this horror of vanishing rises the voice calling out, or poetry; as against this it struggles to be revealed. This is a struggle in darkness itself:

Against
So strong a current you cannot advance. My call is like
An outstretched arm. And its raised hand, tensed
As for gasping, remains for you
Always, defense and warning
Ungraspable One-palm out, wide open.

(from Rilke, The Seventh Elegy)

Ungraspable, they come as a shadow, they come as gray and black, and they are different from black and gray, spreading and chasing, bruising and igniting, bleeding black, bleeding in black, faces hallucinating and burning like fire facing a wall, or paper, awake and blind, silenced by the sound of their own inner, vanishing rhythm. That which was revealed back then, during nights lived as the nocturnal poetry of the soul. As the depth of the night of their soul, the faces of the interior erupt, forming into a portrait that when I gaze at it now, I can't help asking: You are the face of what?
When I was a child, when they showed up for the first time, when I hadn't yet learned the sound-tracks composed for them by poetry-I knew how to tell them, time after time, to leave. To disappear. To be swallowed on the spot. Back into the crucible of burnt fears that ejected them. Not yet, still not, I didn't know then how to say the face of death. The same "what" and the same dread remained dangling in the same void of no-thing to which those faces were turned, flickering as if darkness itself desired to acquire a body and a likeness and image and to materialize and be. In the hushed listening to the wish of absolute darkness for bright light, the shadow appears as a fierce striving toward revelation. The shadow seeks to be disclosed and created as other than itself from within the entrails of the night-it ascends and seizes the light that heals the ghosts, the light that drives away Sheol, the underworld. Night after night the darkness longs to disappear, dreams of waking. Its wish recalls the deepest wish of the portrait, of the drawing of the portrait: To materialize as a real life figure, to be like a creature of the interior. As an image, a Zelem.
In Zvi Lachman's portraits the image is forever delayed on the darkening banks of the shadow. The light of the soul hasn't been lit yet, the primordial, original struggle of matter in terms of its material essence-sealed and lost-hasn't ceased yet. The portrait lingers there, in the mist of its shadow, like the poet lingered on the dark banks of his soul, giving voice to the same expanse of a speechless threshold, and slowly, silently conjuring it as a place of enormous and anonymous tarrying without end, unknown to itself and its fellow-being, mysterious and groping, struggling with what-the same "what" left with the night's devouring mouth hanging open, a mouth that dawn seals and blots out, erases and revises in the shafts of light that return and advance.

The evening has no end
children's tears
suspended
source of the night
crossing the street
a void dark
as an incision
all along my memory
the evening has no end.

(from Yona Wallach, "The Evening")
Now when I look at the whitening perforations of that same unending evening, an evening that is poured into the gloom of the night, my glance keeps returning there beyond the portrait drawings of Zvi Lachman. By means of the medium of those faces I call out to the faces that lash and trickle from within the same corridor of gloom: The face of the shadow of death.
The eruption of the faces of the shadow of death breaks in as a memory from within the shadow, as a shadow from a shadow. Viscous, close, adamant in its surrender, shifting the boundaries of the known even as it crams the unknown into its interior. And this in the amalgamating presence of shadow and light, impoverishing the light, ridding it of its essence, flinging it from henceforth into the undiluted abyss, abandoning it as if to hide, to mask its face. The jagged face of the shadow of the soul, of the shadow of life and light, are forces uprooted from the body that grope in order to become a body. In their contradictory embodiment, disclosed line by line, they are blind to the spectator who stands stock still before them. The shadows break through and revive childhood monsters of a primordial evening, forgotten like childhood, saturated like its perishing. In the dreadful silence they embark on being, a stillness that meshes in its depth the scratching of the charcoal, the forced movements of the hand that draws and that erases. Within the same silence floats a distant, hushed attentiveness of a child who, frozen, listens to the exaggerated pounding of his heart. He listens and for the first time recognizes the knowledge deep as the sea of silence itself, of the certain presence of death-an awareness that sets out like darkness to banish more and more into its interior everything this child knew until then. Ruined from that primary cognizance of before, of before the shadow of death, he awakes. And years later he still awakes, his hand, like the same black and anonymous hand, traces the same knowledge that banished life and greatly diminished its wondrous, luminous strength.
For Zvi Lachman, the hand that draws trails after the tempestuous features of that same mad awakening from sleep that is not sleep. The drawing is a sort of magic ritual of restraint and repose by the forces implicated in that same night of unceasing awakening beyond the end of childhood.
Portrait after portrait underscores the long night of the end of childhood. It is dreamt again and again in the black of the charcoal as an unremitting tempest that deafens its own quiescence. The memory that is drawn as the faces of the poets, as the hidden face of their great, dark poetry, awakens recesses of consciousness that have learned something about the disclosed distance, about the loss of that very distance as a result of the opaque and mute proximity of death. Here it is, closing in and near you, the shadow of death and you are a child who won't fall asleep.
A girl wakes up and is aware and knows something that she should forget, something that she remembers forever.
What can reconcile these forces that struggle so? What will calm and allow the same sight to conceal itself in its vanishing hiding places? The faces before you do not know how to answer this question, but they summon you, eyes shut, beyond the secret wish revealed in poetry as the hidden within the transparency of words. The sight is gathered through the echo of the silence and the calling:

Would my face.

(from Rilke, The Tenth Elegy)

-- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Duino Elegies, translated by Edward Snow (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 2000).
-- Yona Wallach, Let The Words: Selected Poems, translated by Linda Stern Zisquit
(New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 2006).