“ALTE SACHEN”: OVERVIEW, QUESTIONS AND more QUESTIONS, PART TWO

─That should do, it corresponds to the little that I remember myself said Teshoo. I avow that the position of my penis is slightly disconcerting for a person of my composure but it should be seen as being a hunk of a highly symbolic ring of features like raising, arousing,  standing, life-giving, fertility, harvest, and so on! Nevertheless, I still wonder why it took you more than twenty years to arrive at this discovery that now seems both justified and I may say, obvious.

─Something or somebody’s disguise was hindering me from seeing the evidence.

─Who could have done this?

─You! Characters coming from a world like yours use to protect identity and privacy with an inborn tendency to be secret and humble.

─That is very right! I am also kind of shy…

─Then, what made you change your habits and come into the open?

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─It was I reckon some egotistic drive…

─Are you kidding?

─Not at all! As you know you are GOING TO DIE…

─I am very much aware. Can you tell me when?

─Any time. This minute, in an hour, a day, a month, a year…for sure much less than five years.

─I believe you, but I don’t see the point (It was a lie!)….

─The problem is that if you go I will be in dire straits. You gave me attention, lent me a name, called me Magister Maximus (the top dog!), took sensitive care of my physical problems, pegged and reinforced my limbs, raised me to the level of Lari House God, and endowed me with infinite calm, poise, and wisdom.  You made me ROYALTY. Should you be gone I would return to be a piece of rotten wood of ridiculous value, neither truly ritualistic nor market-determined, to be placed not on a funny Mohammed high stand, but somewhere in the corner or the attic, covered with dust and threatened to be smashed to pieces during a wild run of your energetic grandchildren or their mentally unbalanced cat. I will become Flotsam…In this perspective, I decided not to hold more trifles about my origins and reveal to you everything I know… I even volunteer to say that   I am not a fake but a freak, in the sense that I was carved according to tradition but astray from it, somewhere on the border of Tourist Art. I was brought to America by a discharged soldier in the fifties, sold to New York’s  Carlebach gallery in the sixties, traded to a known collector in the seventies, and acquired from him by you in the nineties.  Now that you have all the data you may do some deep thinking about how to leave without letting me behind in a total mental and physical morass. And the extremely dignified Teshoolama image faded away…

I understood perfectly his discourse, funny enough, even before he started to talk…He asks me to destroy him before my demise! Sorry pal, I do not have, at least for the moment,  an answer to your question. Your question, my question…but answers if there are any, they are not the same….And the world is built on endless unanswered questions… If aliens are not coming in, any kind of aliens, even native ones, I cannot raise my hand against Teshoolama… He is loaded with all the virtues I miss and I admire …And I do not feel that haters of sorts will come tomorrow…And cultures and nations and people and individuals are generally not conquered, they disintegrate by fatigue like steel springs after contracting and expanding a hundred thousand times. It is a slow process! Teshoo will go with my son, and that should be the end of the story, but till then I will have another meditation and a new reverence in stock for him. So long! 

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Zen pupil: sorry master to ask that now after such a marathon post but I just realized that both heads, the Brancusi’s and Teshoo’s express remarkable spirituality. Why is one worth a million and the other pennies? Zen master: Because one is a recognized art object and the other is not.  Zen pupil: But how do you recognize an art object? Zen master: man, you are kind of dense! By its value, of course!

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Zen pupil: Please forgive me master for nagging you, but Teshoolama carving is quite different from the BUL-UL. The first is crouching, his long hands are holding the member and his feet are above the ground while the Rice Deity is seated, his hands crossed on his knees and his feet tucked into the bog. Zen master: Please, both Teshoolama and the Wanderer are elderly persons, at their age, to be a little bit confused is not a capital sin is even the rule…

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