The Cartesian Divide of the Nation-State Emotion and Bureaucratic Logic

After breakfast in the institute where I am living and studying Hebrew, I board the crowded, clanking bus to the bank, to change British pounds into Israeli lirot. The excitable to the stolid. Three clerks, a line of metal folding chairs, and forms, many of them. As the first client moves over to the second clerk, the first sitting in line goes to the first clerk and the rest of us stand, almost synchronized, and move over one seat. From clerk to clerk, each with mounds of paper and a host of stamps standing like chessmen, to be moved strategically from form to form, adding, deducting, checking, checkmating the client over to the next clerk. From seat to seat we stand, move over, sit. Endgame, toppling under paper, spewed onto the pavement melting in the sun. Where in heaven's name do they keep all that paper, tripled, quadrupled, stacked in packets, packed in racks, racked on shelves, shelved … somewhere, more likely under the earth. Huge underground storage vaults crowded to their metal ceilings with paper, silent, orderly, stamped into submission. The paper substrate of the Zionist State, the textual foundations of its pioneering subjects.