Today: “Soldier shoots man armed with knife at the Louvre.”

Feb, 2, 2017

I'm still trying to grasp the number "17" on my calendar, I keep feeling like time has stopped at 2016, and the numbers keep rolling over the 16, empty of meaning. Maybe all numbers are just that, a veil covering something else, something other. A veil covering a face.

But dates are not numbers, they are reference points, singular reference points which distill the space and time around them in the form of events. Dates are focal nodes which attract events in infinite directions, yet have the power to mean something singular for each one of us. Dates are reference points in the sense that, a certain day in the year would mean that history has taken a drastic turn, a turn to something other, an elsewhere. Thus, we Palestinians have, a Nakbah, a post and pre-1948 Palestine.

“Death being the form of the symbolic itself.”
- Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death

And all lines protruding from the date, point to Death. Publications, works of art, notes on fridges, they all have dates and they're all marked with death. The date, the death which the date holds, allows for a space where memory can form, where Today would be a site without a place.(1)

In D'ailleurs Derrida, Safaa Fathy's exploration of the life, work, and consequently the death of the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida, she takes him to a fish tank.

"Their sense and understanding of time is completely untranslatable to how I understand time.”

The sense of time is untranslatable to me. I feel like this year is folding on me like a big ravaging wave, sweeping me under it, a massive carpet, first the shadow and then I drown.


Feb, 3, 2017

From this “site without a place” that is today, taking it as a reference point, I will trace what crosses it. I will bear witness.

Today means one is alive, one is a witness, one is under the illusion that they are alive and one. When you read this it will be today for you, you may take the date of the entry as your reference point. As from today, you witness, and I am dead.

Today is as singular as it is universal, my today and your today, is a date, a site without a place.

Today, you are far away

And I, didn't ask you why

What could I say - The National, About Today

We are always standing at a distance from today. Today is always one step ahead. This distance which allows us a space to grasp the events going on around us. To be able to grasp today, to witness today, is allowing death to sweep it and turn it into a date.

Feb, 2, 2017

Regina Spektor has just released a haunting music video for her song Black and White. It has taken days and months to complete her work, but to release the video is to give it a date, a reference point where it’s filed under. With strong magical vocals, and the sound of instruments which are not to be seen, Spektor sits at a piano in the abandoned Uptown Theatre of Chicago, pretending that her playing matches the electronic 80s beat of her track. She sings “ Should I wait for tomorrow?.” A ballerina is seen dancing on a stage in another place, dancing to her music without seeing her. The ballerina follows the music she has been twirling with to it’s source, she finds herself on a staircase, before the ghost Pianist Spektor. In surprise, the ballerina starts fading away until she vanishes completely. The music stops, having no ballerina to play to, and Spektor stops playing as if she woke up from a dream. We are then shown a haunting image of the empty theatre, no performers, the theatre again is left to itself. The performance is today, it’’s spectral, happening and not happening, a voice over, a track to pretend we are playing piano to. It fades away and the date remains. The date is the theatre. The theatre has a history which has since it’s construction in 1925, been a place for many today's, many performances. Today is a site without a place.

Today in headlines, Feb, 3, 2017

“A man has reportedly attempted to a attack a French soldier with a knife, near Paris’ famed Le Louvre are gallery, and the soldier opened fire in self defense.”

The Louvre was constructed in the 12th century as a fortress, it meant to protect Paris in a unsettling time in History.

After it had lost it’s function as a fortress, it nonetheless became a fortress of power and wealth.

In 1793, The French Revolution opened the doors of the Louvre to the public.

In Peter Weiss’ The Aesthetics of Resistance, the narrator describes one of the paintings in the Louvre, saying that the motivation behind it was the “unendurability of life.”

“A French soldier on Friday, opened fire on a wounded man armed with a knife who was trying to enter the Louvre museum with a knife.”

In David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, the protagonist burns the Louvre painting for warmth.

“Following the completion of the Louvre, it was abandoned for over a century, when the court moved to Versailles.”

“Soldier shoots man armed with knife at the Louvre.”

“The whole play of history and power is disrupted with this event.” - Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism

In his essay, Jean Baudrillard puts us face to face with the urgency of events which are always a step ahead of us. Like today, they are hard to grasp and to keep up with. We sit back and try to soberly analyze and understand, yet the violent event passes us by and changes everything that comes after it. A man attempting to enter the Louvre with a knife, stopped by the bullet of a French soldier. He may have been stopped but the ramifications of the symbolic attempt of a terror attack in the Louvre can’t be stopped. The event is ahead of us, beyond us, a disruption on the face of normalcy, like a bullet, like today.

The site which is the Louvre, has seen so many transformations of use and distribution of power over the centuries, from a focal node of power and wealth, to a public urban space of gravitational cultural force, to a place where a French soldier shoots an armed man, to Today. A site without a place.