Boatman appeared at a hotel by the Dead Sea. There, at the heart of a revolving world, a 34-floor hotel stands tall, a giant Noah’s ark poised over still waters. The Noah’s ark hotel rises with its bow facing the sky, and from the height of that bow, the moon shines twice – on the waters and on the dark skies. Many people poured into this ark, though at times, tears kept us from seeing them. We could see – rivers of salty tears flowing through gentle, rounded ducts, pouring down legs straight to a thick sea.
We’d like to tell you something about this Noah’s ark, where Boatman was born, and also about human beings.
**
For weeks, Tal Simon sat inside Noah’s ark, sketching with black ink dozens of drawings on small pieces of paper. Lines became limbs; strange, disassembled bodies sought to reassemble. Eventually, a complete body emerged – arms, torso, legs. The man’s arms became oars, his hands grew larger and rounder, and his two feet straightened into a mast. Boat-man. Boatman belongs to a world in an ark resting beside silvery waters.
The world has become liminal, featuring an eternal horizon. Beneath it lies the sea, which has swallowed everything that came before into its depths. What came before: The soft hills of the Wadi of the Elephants’, squills that bloom and wither and bloom again. Warm soil underfoot, the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, flocks of starlings and storks fill the sky. Anemones, and a cool sea breeze, placed correctly to the west, beyond the soft horizon.
**
Now there are skies underfoot.
And gray ocean landscapes.
The world floats; the world is sorrowful*. The birds are strange, and the horizon is flat and still. The white sun is misplaced, and these are not birds. They are what were once sunrays, shattered on soft waters. They are shards of his broken heart; they are red anemones drawn in black ink. They are beaks and sources, bird-anemones. They are a cloud of raptors, a heap of flower skeletons on graves, or the crest of waves. They are a thousand paper cranes and a thousand life-years. When he has finished folding his thousand crane-flowers and weaving them back together, what would Boatman ask for himself?
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*In Buddhist writings, the term Ukiyo can be interpreted as the floating world, the sorrowful world, and it describes a cosmic and eternal world of rebirth, suffering, death, and the transient, unreliable nature of life.
