A SANDPIT

I used to write with a stick on the ground. Like everybody.
I used to write with my finger on the sand. Like everybody.
Like everybody here and there. HERE and THERE.
With no doubt my writing HERE was something else, something unlike someone's writing THERE.

For example of Australian Aborigines.
Their situation seems extremely different than ours. Yet only seems so. Maybe it is only very different. Or maybe even only different, simply neither the same nor alike. It is different due to a certain reversal: HERE the land belongs to people while THERE people belong to the land. Although we used to speak about Mother-Earth, about Fatherland, although we can adore it and miss it, nevertheless we easily cut this Mother-Earth into pieces, divide by acres, buy and sell, rent or lease. The rest is but poetry, metaphors, just blathering, unclear notions, smudged ideas, metaphysical anxiety, philosophical troublemaking, incomprehensible mumbling considered the expression of the highest values and most noble feelings. An nobody, digging in a garden, will imagine this as digging a spade into the living flesh of his or her mother or father or grandfather or more distant ancestor ....... or that entering a cave is like reversing the process of birth, that one is coming back to the womb, getting into it, neither in symbolic nor mystic way but in absolutely real and physical way ...... THERE the ground is for THEM a real Ancestor's body, because Ancestor (not necessarily having a human form) while committing various acts that formed a certain territory, saturated the ground with its energy, blood, sweat, semen or other secretions, or maybe even its body has transformed into this or that rock or mountain or plain. So, when an Aborigine begin to draw something on the ground, whet he/she puts the finger into sand and dust he/she feels like plunging the finger right into the Ancestor's flesh, as if connecting himself/herself to the source of energy, as if placing the finger in a power socket ...... no! of course not! that's a trap! an ordinary, always repeated mistake: not “as if”, there's no “as if”, everything is absolutely real ..... at least for THEM .....

And HERE?
Sometimes I was writing something with a stick. Or with a finger. But more often with a stick. Something: trifles, things unimportant, having very weak or almost no impact on the world's fate. Sometimes I was drawing a symbol, a sign: --> or X and they were very important signs because they had great impact on the game we were playing (hare and hounds). Sometimes I was drawing-writing something on the beach and then I was looking the water wipe these scribbles away. A typical event, like catching a cold. However I used to catch a cold more often.
Years later I made a sandpit in front of my house. Not a big one. A cripple square one. More or less one and a half by one and a half meter. A classical garden one: the edges were made of old tree trunks. At first my daughter had been playing in it and when she stopped I thought maybe there could be my turn. I could have cleaned and smoothed the sand surface and write-draw a poem-picture. Something haiku-like. Something quick. Very short-lasting ........ I would turn the sandpit into a trap for beautiful thoughts ..... Then I would take a picture. Then I would print it. Then I would put it into a wooden box of the same proportions as the sandpit. Thus another sandpit would be created – a sandpit full of thoughts, thoughtwords and thoughtimages ...... A real, physically existing, small sandpit, although it could have been named a pagepit (or a letterpit? a signpit?) - yes, it is very important this would not be a sheer description, just a description, because beautiful descriptions have veiled the world, broken the links with the physical world ......
And what would happen to the original? Should I wipe it away or should I let it vanish slowly and “naturally” and only when it is entirely erased by all the creatures and entities falling, walking, flying, running, crawling, blowing ...... then I would write-draw a new poem-picture? Or maybe it could be only one poem-picture: everyday I would take one picture thus testifying how it was disappearing – then I would put all pictures into the box placing the first one on the top of the pile – a reader-looker would read-look (or look-read) a story about disappearing, disintegrating, dispersing, drifting and flowing away ......
Well, do I really need a real sandpit? Yes I do.
Isn't it better to make a computer simulation? Not, it isn't better. Physicality is physicality. Can't be replaced. Can't be eluded.
Has it to be testified? Does it need any documentation and records? Taking pictures? Printing? Copying? Distributing? Does anybody has to worry it will vanish, perish, disappear irretrievably? What will perish: a beautiful thought? vision? deft words? intriguing concept?
What must be flowing should flow. Let it then flow away ...... A flying butterfly is more beautiful than the one pinned to the bottom of a showcase.

And it has flown away.
That's good. Everything is flowing.
HERE and THERE.


However I still have a chance to make a flowing book. But I will not weed flowers that has grown in the sandpit. I can find another place. I can sweep dried leaves aside here and there....

I could also write-draw on water. Or on air.
(This would be an extraordinary exercise in calligraphy: write invisibly! It's almost like playing inaudibly – if I ever decided to run once again a drumming workshop I would sit the apprentices at the drums and forbid them to play; and when they almost exploded with desire to play I would tell them to play inaudibly, soundlessly ...... )

I could.
I could go to the garden or meadow or wood and write on the air a big sentence with big letters.
Yes. I should do that from time to time.
Yes. I should. I should do this more often.
I will go now to the terrace and I will do this.
I will write an invisible poem about wind.

I went out. I wrote it.
It flew away. Beautiful and pure.

Yes. It should be like that. Sometimes.
Because not everything can be immortalized.
Because not everything must be immortalized.
Not everything.
Not.



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