The Horror of What You Don't See

We sit in the shelter listening to the sounds beyond the closed door. Sometimes even just moving a chair sounds like an interception or a falling bomb and a tremor passes through all the neighbors. When we hear launches, there is a momentary silence. We try to identify by the sound a direction of movement or any piece of information. The door that shuts us in together inside the shelter for protection is the same door that opens wide in our imagination and floods in everything that cannot be seen. And what cannot be seen is always more. The messenger runs in, panting, he tells us that the disaster has occurred. Outside, a tragedy has occurred, a horror has unfolded, blood has been shed.

Danielle Cohen Levy , Photography: Ori Urian

In the Greek theater, the acts of violence do not take place on stage. The messenger or the chorus who enter from the outside world deliver the news, report on the events beyond the door. They describe what happened, the screams of the children, the hanging body, the pins that have pierced eyeballs. And the words are like a key, and once it is released, the imagination sets sail.

The power of the stage lies in its ability to mobilize. A line is a wall. A turn is time. A knife is an end. From the moment I arrive, my imagination is also invited to take part and within a moment I am involved. An essential partner in completing the picture. My body is as well. Everything takes part in telling the story together. And the more accurate the image, the more I see and do not see at the same time. And what I do not see is always more.

Maybe that's why what I do see turns me dark, wears me down. An endless sequence of terrifyingly real events is streamed straight into the palm of my hand. And the more I see, the more I no longer see. The endless multiplicity blunts the senses. The shock fades. The images take on a dimension of alienation. Whose body do I see. Whose blood. Whose lifted baton. I've seen worse. I can't see any more. I move on to the next image, and then the next, and the next.

But the baby in Hanoch Levin's "Requiem," the one I never saw, the one the mother couldn't wake up after the water was spilled on him, I can't get over. And my tears shed with her were completely real. Because words are also like a pin, etching an image into the eyeball and bringing down a tear that will always remain. And another moment of breath. Because just as the stage can send us to visit the spaces of horror and grief, it is also the one that returns us to ourselves. It gives us a set of keys that open doors to compassion and hope. Because in this space where we sit in the dark or in the light and are invited to imagine together, only there, after we have also cried together, can we perhaps also imagine a future. Because now the door has opened.

Photography: Danielle Cohen Levy

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