Jerusalem

¶Jerusalem is a blank slate, a Rorschach test, a floating sig­nifier, an empty vessel, a mirror. It is always both a metaphor and not a metaphor. It has quantum states. It is Schrödinger’s city.

¶Each layer touches every other layer. In this way, it isn’t really an onion. There is no core, root, trunk, axis, omphalos, heart, or center that might be reached. Yet it is also only ever always these things. If you want it to be an onion, just try to peel it. Its layers are the Book of Sand; just try to burn it.

¶If you enter its garden, the paths will diverge and con­verge and ramify into infinity, and you will find your own self mul­ti­plied in time.

¶Or maybe think of it more whim­si­cally. It is a puff pastry. But beware: its folds and turns can’t be num­bered. You will not be able to rest it in your freezer; if you over­handle it, its butter will melt.

¶Its anagogy cuts into its lit­er­ality; its tropology fuses with its topology. It is a com­pound, an admixture. It trans­mutes, trans­mo­grifies. It makes the alchemist jealous. You both can and can not turn it into gold. You both can and can not ask it to embody the sacred. It is a rhizome. It adheres and coheres; it is frac­tured and dis­con­tinuous, mul­tiple and unruly.

¶It is hier­ar­chical and anti-hierarchical. It moves from the top and from the bottom. It is the Law and its subversion.

¶It manages to contain and rein­cor­porate within itself the seeds of its own con­tra­dic­tions. In this way it is like the binary or like Cap­i­talism. As with Cap­i­talism, there is a special kind of realism about it: it is hard to imagine an outside or a beyond. Find a surface, form, or void in which it does not insist on its own presence, even if only through its absence. Just try. Its space of pos­sibles was drawn by Escher or Möbius; its space of pos­sibles was drawn by my daughter who is two. She has no limits, either. 

¶It limits you. Like God in the Gran teatro del mundo, it assigns roles. You are an ety­mol­ogist, an anti­quarian, a geneal­ogist, a chrono­g­rapher, an ethno­g­rapher, a car­tog­rapher, an archae­ol­ogist, a philol­ogist, a scribe, an obste­trician, a grave digger. An avid acolyte serving the ritual. Every role is dif­ferent but in every role, it wants you to trace its lines. It wants you to divine an essence.

¶It is per­for­mative. You can do things with Jerusalem. It is ren­dered reality through the utterance.

¶It is also per­for­mative because the movement of bodies, the ges­tures, the affect, the trap­pings, the voice, all fashion its con­structed kernel.

¶Con­sider what remains outside of the per­for­mance. Con­sider uttering it without making it be.

¶It requests that you imagine the present through its past. And this is key. Through its utterance and per­for­mance, it wants you to invent nations. It wants you to conjure futures in the idea of stones. It wants you to live inside that lineage; it wants to exclude you from that lineage.

¶It draws circles and cir­cum­scribes pos­si­bil­ities. It demands that you solve its equation. But it also reminds you that you were never good at math, and that either way, its numbers are irra­tional. No logic machine can contain its pos­si­bil­ities. The circles and tri­angles that Llull ends up drawing fill the world. The map becomes time iself.

¶If the search for metonymns and similes becomes tiresome, you can approach it apophat­i­cally, but know that its neg­ative the­o­log­i­cally is inverted. Through reduction and elim­i­nation you are left with either excess or radical absence instead of singularity.

¶It riffs on strains of eros and thanatos. It begs you to feel it as a womb, a seed, a gesture of love, a gen­er­ation. It begs you to feel it as a bar­gaining chip, a bludgeon, a river of blood, a cemetery.

¶It has rocks, dirt, water, air, trees, wind. There are cats on its walls. Its system con­tains these things, and these things exceed its system.

¶It is mobile. It travels. You can take its rocks and put them else­where. You can take its forms and replicate them. You can sim­ulate it in space, time, or ideas. Its mate­ri­ality can take shape in your imma­terial recesses. 

¶And here is the Iberian con­nection: all of it, all of these uncon­tained mul­ti­tudes, belong to Spain.

¶It is the eastern al-Andalus. Felipe VI is its king, as was Fer­dinand the Catholic. Felipe II owned a box in which he kept it, and he wore the key around his neck. Franco had it built in the Retiro, and he entered rev­er­ently into the Aedicule right there, in the heart of Madrid, just as Juan Carlos did when he visited the other Holy Land across the Mediter­ranean. When Alfonso XIII left Spain to make room for the Republic, he stopped there in the city, and his voyage is not much more than the real­ization of Alfonso X’s dream to have his heart buried there or Jaume el Conqueridor’s dream of con­quest. If Quaresmius had had his way, Felipe IV would have sat there on a throne in 1631. Carlos III built it into the buro­cracy. The Pious Work of the Holy Places is nested within the Ministry.

¶What does it mean that Jerusalem both is and is not Spanish? Why does it matter that the king of Jerusalem lives in Iberia?

¶The power to possess the Holy City is the power to make meaning, to control the cat­egory of The Holy, to master the past, to sep­arate wheat from chaff, to be chosen for a sacred journey from there to heaven. Through the diverse hands that cradle and massage it in varied con­texts across cen­turies, meanings are made. Stakes are claimed. Walls are built. Deals are signed. And Spain is invented. The plen­itude of escha­tology is realized. Spain holds the keys to the Sep­ulcher. His­panidad is man­i­fested in the heart of Palestine.

¶In the routes they trace, in the rhythm of their steps, Andalusi and Sefardic pil­grims can both confirm and deny this entire story. As with al-Andalus itself, such pilgrims—especially once they have become memory and monument—can be made to signify opposing things for dif­ferent people. Jerusalem belongs to Spain; Spain is in the Holy Land; Spain is the Holy Land. Or not.

¶The members of a black con­fra­ternity in Seville, the Nahua and Tagalog speaking parish­ioners in Puebla or Manila, the moriscos and con­versos attending the bap­tisms of their children beneath a statue of la Almudena or San­tiago or el Santo Niño de la Guardia, the anchorite and the hermit chastising their flesh while they men­tally invoke its spaces, all render devo­tions to it that both are and very much are not the precise Spanish Jerusalem that Felipe keeps in a box with the key around his neck.

¶To see these facts is to see a map of unnum­bered pos­si­bil­ities; a mul­ti­plicity, an uncon­tainable resource for tran­scen­dence and grotesque anni­hi­lation. An unending fountain to water the garden of forking paths. The nation becomes a womb and a cemetery, an olive branch and the freedom fighter’s gun.

¶Spanish Jerusalem is exactly all of this, and its exact opposite. A quin­tes­sence of sic et non. A real First-Rate Place. It is plen­itude and invention and also the com­plete emp­tying of meaning, the simulcral pre­cession, the strange ven­tril­o­quism, the vapid nullity. The merely nominal, the titular. The void. The sig­nifier without a sig­nified. The knowledge that it was ever only a fiction, and yet the recog­nition that the fiction itself is Archimedes’ lever. The mul­ti­plicity so countless as to be mean­ingless. And also the only site where meaning can be made.

¶An axiom: Spanish Jerusalem is illegible. Read it.