“ALTE SACHEN”: OVERVIEW, QUESTIONS AND more QUESTIONS, PART ONE *

The next day, which was both yesterday and Saturday, I moved up in control. I washed the dishes***, prepared breakfast, took the drugs, launched the washing machine, threw emergency plans, and made a monumental discovery. Notwithstanding the absence of valuable cooking gas, it was possible to get coffee, strong coffee, with water boiled in an electric kettle…Add one or two cardamon seeds to the concoction and you are back in style..what can I say? Better late than never…

Then I took the statue of my spiritual master, Teshoolama, which was on the floor during my four months absence-Akko is on an earthquake-plagued fault- and put it standing on the top of Muhammad’s Stairs to Heaven. This stand of fortune was originally a bookshelf produced by my regular and weird cabinet maker Muhammad whose parts and whole were askew. It was a monstrous artifact, to put it mildly, but after accepting the suggestion of my old friend and artist Rafi L. to provide it with aluminum fancy legs it became a pristine example of what Andre Malraux would call Art by Metamorphose.

The story of Teshoolama is no less intriguing or complex. It is a wood representation of a slender male character with a knobby spine, elongated torso, and stick-like arms and legs. It is provided with a finely carved sparingly sketched head reminiscent of some Brancusi stylized primary forms and weirdly enough, holds between its hands an oversized penis provided with a remarkable pair of hanging balls. From the very beginning of its arrival in my attention and then in my ownership I burned to get some data about the origins of the work, its significance, and its use. What it was not, was evident. It wasn’t an African sculpture. So, at a certain moment, it is a long story, I sent some photos to Hermione W. a quite nice and beautiful lady who was the assistant of the imposing, elephant-like, William Fagg, keeper of Ethnography at the British Museum, an outstanding renowned scholar who seemed to suffer of a certain form of aphasia. I believe Hermione inherited, not the aphasia but his glorious position and continued strongly after retirement to be a first-class ethnic art expert. When I called her to get some views, she was a little bit embarrassed, she is a very kind lady, to tell me that my erratic or hieratic, as you like, sculpture seemed to be a fake or a freak. For those who didn’t spend their life in art history, it sounds like the same crap, different rap. I assure you that there is a major difference between the terms but I don’t want to go into it. To gild a little bit the bitter pill, Hermione followed: But what do I know? Somebody may discover with proof that the actual bizarre is an extremely valuable unique piece worth a fortune (ubiquitous irrational dream of any art expert, collector, or simple manic of ownership). And what do you think she asked me? Well, I said, it may be an object done, created if you want, in the enormous spread of the African Diaspora in Central and South America to be used in a fertility ritual, as the position of his hands and member seem to indicate. It was what I vaguely and halfheartedly thought then. Hermione laughed politely and we separated friends. All this happened more than twenty years ago.

Then, the black idol stepped on his scrawny legs in my universe without identity, a kind of migrant and nameless personage. He didn’t have to wait too much to get an appellative and a big one. Years before his arrival I became enticed by a fictional character, I met once and then a hundred times afterward in Kipling’s master book, Kim. He was a tall Buddhist Tibetan monk who came to India to find a river that emerged from a spot where once upon a time an arrow shot by Siddhartha (another name for Buddha meaning “he who reached his aim”) hit the ground. Immersion in the pure stream of this holy river was cleaning one of all the sins of his miserable human life. Imagine the size of the boon. The problem with my marvelous patron and mentor, what he very soon after the first meeting became, was that he had fewer sins than a donkey, singing skills. His name was Teshoolama. He chose abode under my skull where he met two other permanent dwellers, my beloved father, and mother who after having faded long ago from the Valley of Tears, felt necessary to keep an eye on me from proximity. Some people never give up.

Teshoo, quite concomitantly let me use his moniker to man up my presence on the internet’s chess sites and other URLs (new word) crossroads and graciously accepted to extend his mighty halo of holiness to what I considered then to be an avatar of the African Diaspora. So, the fictional Holy Man towering in his Superego (keep Freud in mind) sat in my mind, me in my humble role of petty bubble and lost bit of reality, and the unidentified piece of carved wood surreptitiously coalesced in a single entity recalling, modestly, the tripartite nature of Shiva the most energic God of the Hindu Pantheon. To clarify that the melting isn’t and wouldn’t be total I have to mention that every time I emerge from a one-hour meditation session, I have done this for twenty years or more, I bend forward with still closed eyes and whisper: Ave Teshoolama, Magister Maximum, three times. I never got any answer, but I felt bliss. That is all.