IMAGES AND MORTGAGES

Images tell stories with which we hold on, respond to like subjects in Bruno Bettelheim’s Ages of Enchantment, absorbed by the not so easily explainable, due in great part to our inner need for seeking certainties. But the stories in the pictures are not innocent. They can represent a spontaneous sub-conscious mood or be the result of someone’s intention to affect others, to posses the viewer. Judaism prohibited certain images from being represented in artifacts; not because of the images themselves -as their narratives are full of images-, but to dismantle a belief system that grants powers to those artifacts; objects able to interfere in the lives of humans. Instead, the text became the sacred medium. The written word as the only one that can serve between wisdom and... whatever! Not just any written word, only “theirs” -the chosen- in the specific Book. As a matter of fact, the stories and images must be in that Book, otherwise they are not valid. Even the original stories in Babilonia, copied  by Judean slaves from the tales of their masters, the Babylonians, are of no importance when valuing the Book. The Book became the most sacred of artifacts, except that it changed values when Christianity took over: too many Jews were illiterate and did not need the Book so it was easy to convince them, leave the literate rabbis and join the world of the spoken word, later on called Christianity, and gradually, they went back to artifacts, including the rosaries that I keep all over my home and scared the hell out of an Orthodox Jew doing an appraisal of my apartment for a mortgage. He then quickly moved his wondering open eyes towards the living room wall, to be once more affected by a painting of a pair of lips licking a penis; leaving in a rush, intensively affected by certain images. I got the mortgage real quick.