#felixhofmann

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How a glass pane became a Buddhist

I am a broken glass pane. Don't worry - I don't want to lodge a complaint about those who have brought me from the state of wholeness to thousands of fragments. That way I became a Buddhist. When I realized: I take all possible forms and to decide which ones is not in my hands. A short time ago, a significant part of me covered the ocean floor not far form the Indonesian coast. Changing my aggreation state has given me, among other things, the quality to reflect. The next phase – I entered in many pieces - has increased my multifacetedness many times more. Just as I have always shared my reflections with you without asking - but mostly not undesirable - I cannot avoid giving you the following advice on your way. Before I set out to mine via dustpan and garbage truck towards Nirvana. I don't take it personally to have been broken. When I was intact it didn't have a bad reputation. Almost everyone has a glass pane in their home, even if the most private things rarely take place in front of windows. I even took the place of some beautiful stone. Even if some - admittedly – attributed me with a certain arrogant and bureaucratic coldness. I was hardened over scorching heat, my edges and burrs removed with the grinder. As stoically as I endured this treatment, I was guarding the display of the shop that I was supposed to clad. I easily endured the tensions that had spread between my molecules. I was ambitious and wanted to shine. Now I might be torn into pieces though I feel in peace because I know that there is an opportunity in every crisis. A cobble stone has become my catharsis. No composite security film fits between being and becoming. We'll meet Again!

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Chapter 18 – the Dark Void

I went to see the building one afternoon after many years. l'd walked along

that perpetually crowded street so very often, on those same sidewalks

where during their midday break necktied but slovenly high-school students

toting their school bags shove each other around, and where husbands

pass on their way home from werk and housewives from their gettogethers,

but l'd never gone back after all these years just to Iook at that

building again, the apartment building which had once meant so much to

me.

lt was an evening in winter. Darkness had fallen early and smoke from

the chimneys had descended on the narrow avenue like a foggy night.

Lights were on in two floors only: dim, dispirited lights in two business offices

where people worked late. Otherwise, the façade of the building was in

total darkness.

 Dark curtains had been closed in dark apartments; the windows

were as empty and frightening as the eyes of a blind person. What I

saw was a cold, insipid, and unprepossessing sight when compared to its

past. One could not even imagine that once an extended family had lived

here, on top of each other, in each other's hair, and in a hubbub.

I enjoyed the rack and ruin which had pervaded the building like the

punishment for the sins of youth. I knew that I was seized by this feeling

only because I could never get my share of sinful bliss, and that seeing the

decay gave me a taste of revenge, but at that moment I had something else

on my mind: "I wonder what happened to the mystery hidden in the pit

which became the airshaft. And what happened to the pit as weil as what

was inside it?"

I thought of the pit which used to be right next to the building, the bottomless

pit that had inspired shivers of fear at night, not only in me but in all the pretty children, girls, and adults who lived on all the floors. lt seethed

with bats, poisonous snakes, rats, and scorpions like a weil in a tale of fantasy.

I had a feeling it was the very pit described in Seyh Galip's Beauty and

Love and mentioned in Rumi's Mathnawi. lt so happened that sometimes

when a pail was lowered into the pit, its rope was cut, and sometimes they

said that there was a black ogre down there who was as big as a house.

Don't you kids go anywhere near it! we were told. One time when the doorman

was dangled down from a rope that was tied to his belt, he returned

from the zero-gravity journey he made into the infinite darkness of time

with tears in his eyes and lungs blackened with cigarette tar for all eternity. I

was aware of the fact that the desert witch who guarded the pit could also

assume the shape of the doorman's moonfaced wife, and that the pit was

closely related to a secret that lay deep in the inhabitants' memories. They

were afraid of the secret inside themselves as if fearful of a past sin that

could not stay buried in the past for all eternity. Eventually they forgot about

the pit, its memories and secrets as weil as what it contained, like instinctive

animals who scratch some dirt to conceal their disgrace.

One morning, waking up from a black nightmare that seethed with human faces, I discovered

that the pit had been covered over. lt was then that I understood with

horror, gripped by the same nightmarish feeling, that the pit had been

turned inside out, and it now rose out of the site that was once called the

pit. They had a new way of referring to this new space that brought mystery and death up to our very windows; they called this darkweil the air shaft.

ln reality, the new space the inhabitants called the air shaft in disgust

and disgruntlement (unlike other lstanbulites who termed this kind of

space a light weil), was neither an air shaft nor a light weil. When the place

was first built, there were vacant lots on either side; it was not one of the

ugly apartment buildings which later lined the street like a solid dirty wall.

When the Iot next to it was sold to a builder, the kitchen windows, the windows

of the narrow and long inner corridor, and the windows of the little

room that was used for different purposes on each floor (storage room,

maid's room, nursery, poor relation's room, ironing room, a distant aunt's

room), all of which had a view of the mosque and the tram tracks, the girls'

lycee, Aladdin's store, and the pit now faced the windows of the tall

row-house style apartment building next door, only three yards away. That

was how a lightless and oppressive space without a breath of air, which was

reminiscent of an infinite weil, was formed in between the dirty nondescript

concrete walls and the windows that reflected each other and the floors

below...

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1-3 fischli & weiss

4-6 constant

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