There is a suburban bakery, right next to a clothes shop, which is continually made the victim of a certain graffitist. He sprays his unreadable message and his signature on the western wall in the car park, and the sun bakes his words into the bricks.
The owners of the property come once a week and remove the offending hieroglyphs, but no sooner are they gone than the offender returns to write his gospel once again.
The graffiti is removed by a certain acidic chemical, sprayed at the wall and scrubbed away, with the occasional application of water from a powerful hose. In other words, the chemical must be applied over the top of the graffiti to take effect – meaning that the shop’s owners are tracing over the rebel’s work exactly. Furthermore, this graffiti artist has a distinct style, and tends to write in the same position the same symbols each time his work is erased.
The two parties are thus engaged in a continual war, a tidal war, over the same space on the wall. Each of them grows familiar with the same set of motions, one believing he is creating and the others destroying.
A radical observer asks: who is the true owner of the wall? Who has been offended against? He’s been writing his message there longer than they’ve owned the place. Some would argue he has a right to be there. And he has partially succeeded in his original goal – have they not by now memorised his name, callsign, and calligraphy, and even internalised his message? Might they not find themselves scribbling it absent-minded into their notebooks during a long phone call, or thinking of the contours of each letter while riding the bus?
One would assume that the owners are still acting within the boundaries of justice in their war upon the graffitist. But consider this: innocence is predicated on innocence, and cruelty on surety. The graffitist forgets that the vandalism is his own work, and thus becomes increasingly innocent. To his eyes, the message disappears every day and he traces its faint remnants in a ritual that suggests to him the spreading of a message, but he no longer remembers that message. Each day, he unknowingly attempts to become himself again. He feels only a faint instinct that a good thing has been offended against, and he must right the vague wrongs ostensibly committed by the bourgeoisie landowners, who he has never met. Put simply, he assumes a constructive position: something has been scrubbed away, and it is his duty to restore what has been lost. He takes on an air of tragic nobility as he decorates the wall, like a Renaissance master who is fated to die in obscurity working on a great fresco.
By contrast, the property owners become increasingly vindictive. They have a right to feel that way, of course, but it is with ever more malicious sentiments that they erase the same message, day after day. One shudders to think of what they would do if they caught the graffitist. It’s not that they become more guilty merely for feeling anger, but their heightened emotions increase the guilt they would feel if they managed to take their revenge. But the work itself is free of these feelings: it assumes a certain rhythm that relaxes them. And independent of all else, the wall must remain spotless for the tenants’ sake.
Eventually, they all work only for the sake of the wall, not for socialist justice against an elite property-owning class or for the sake of an amorphous and ill-defined public order. In fact, both groups have forgotten one another’s existence. Now, the aging landowners see themselves as pious scribes, tracing over a haphazard blue trail of paint. They loyally copy a script they still don’t understand but the contours of which they remember as well as their children’s names. It’s not an erasure but a memorisation: the message disappears once it is learned through the copying, the internalisation into the very bodies of the chosen disciples. And it reappears every day through the grace of a hidden power. And the artist is also copying, following the traces of their destruction, equally loyally restoring the message he believes is being eradicated daily, by heathens trying to suppress a mysterious vision.
verso folio 