Today it’s not time to write about hate, today it’s time to write about love, two things that – as everyone knows – touch each other.
When I set foot in Jerusalem for the first time, I immediately noticed the unresolved emotional trauma that its stones suffer. I don’t say it. The Bible says: “The days will come when your enemies will build a siege wall around you, they will surround you and attack you from all sides. They will knock you and your children to the ground, and they will not leave one stone upon another”, Saint Luke informs us as if the evangelist were a reporter from Al-Jazeera or CNN sent to the Middle East today.
The last time I was there, the thrice-holy city was still dealing with unresolved trauma. The newspaper The Jerusalem Post reported on those days of a force prior to all the prophets. The love story of the Israeli soldier Rea Eckhaus, how he had fallen in love with a married Palestinian woman who used to cross his checkpoint in a Mercedes. The mutual suction lasted two and a half months, with the Israeli soldier walking across Palestinian land to the wife’s house in secret from the other soldiers (and the Palestinian’s husband, of course). “I snatched away her energy and her desire so hypnotically that I still can’t explain it,” confessed the Hebrew man of the Arab woman.
It is the same hypnotic suction experienced by lovers who preceded them eleven thousand years ago: the lovers of Ain Sakhri, a calcite carving preserved in the British Museum.
What is special about this small sculpture? Which is the oldest representation that has come down to us of two human beings making love. Carved in a river stone when the last ice age was coming to an end.
Who sculpted it? Someone from the culture that archaeologists call the Natufians, a Late Epipaleolithic people settled in the territory that stretches from the present-day Gaza Strip to Syria through Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon: the oldest love goes be carved at the point in the world where we are accumulating the most hate.
It has the intensity of kisses modeled by Brancusi or Rodin, and the sensuality changes when you move the piece and observe it from different angles. “Viewed from one side, you have a general overview of the embrace. From another, a penis can be seen; from another, a vagina; from another, breasts – comments the British sculptor Marc Quinn -. You move around it and the object is revealed in real time. It’s almost like in a porn movie: you have pans, close-ups; it takes on a cinematic quality when you turn it around. And yet, it is a moving and beautiful object about the relationship between people.”
It is impossible to discern the gender of these two humans who, loving each other, make love. An indeterminacy that the British Museum takes advantage of in its activities to reflect and give an LGTBI air to the sculpture. Nothing new in the Holy Land: the same copy of The Jerusalem Post that explained the sucking between the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian woman in the Mercedes reported that the new actor of the Titanes series – the one who would play the role of Jericho – was “trans, Asian , deaf and Jewish”.
Having reached this unfathomable point, we can only surrender to the enigma of love and admire these two humans who mix their sweat and melt their bodies, so embraced that it seems that they are taking each other’s breath away. another, with that carnal impact of those who… stab themselves? Because they’re not killing each other, right?
I put the bad thoughts out of my head, today it’s time to talk about love and not hate, and I focus on the cave where the sculpture was found and named the lovers, Ain Sakhri, in the Wa Valley said Khareitun. I look for some other story of passion that arose in this part of the Judean desert and I find one that went around the world in the spring of 2001: the murder, in a cave in the same valley, of two boys aged 13 and 14 , Koby and Iosef.
They were stabbed and attacked with stones until their bodies were deformed: it was difficult to distinguish the remains of one from the other. The killers smeared the wall of the cave with the blood of the two teenagers. It happened in the same valley where the carving of the first humans making love appeared. In a land called the West Bank.
But today it’s not time to talk about hate, but about love, and Koby’s parents help me with that. After the murder of their son they declared that throwing stones back at others “is not an intelligent response” and that falling into revenge is “giving victory” to the killers.
The parents named after their son a foundation to help victims of terrorism, also with comedy acts that continue to raise the curtain, Comedy for Koby, because their son loved telling jokes and being told them.
Apocalyptic humor and epipaleolithic love: it’s luxury glitter for a cabaret that illuminates the darkness.
