If we were to shave the globe at sea level, we would be left at that place with a dent of over 400 metres in depth. At no other spot does one come as close to being at the centre-point of the earth; here one sticks right into the thick skin of the planet. Everything here is crust, everything here is salt. The seabed seems to consist of great plates that repeatedly thrust against each other with a muffled hum. It feels as if the ear-drum has been overstretched. On the shore, the salt flaunts the full range of its manifold forms. For no apparent reason it is now snarling cave, now pink marble, sometimes fine pebble, at other times intertwined organ, sand, breach, cut, crack, scratch, rusty scrap. One loses sense of the dimensions of the world, one feels that one is suddenly inside a crystal, in the heart of a kernel of salt.
Nothing that makes up the planet elsewhere is to be found here – it’s a spot of perfect beauty unspoilt by any sort of organic life. If there is a God who has created the world, he’s showing the people in the Dead Sea that he could have also fashioned it differently – more absolute, more lineal. With humans this world can do nothing. While all other oceans hold something that can devour you, something against which you must constantly guard yourself, by means of swimming movements, or boat planks, or rescue rings and tyres, the Dead Sea simply does not open up for humans.
While swimming or, more accurately, floating in this salt solution, one senses something like a fine film between the sea’s liquidity and one’s skin – it’s as though the water simply does not reach the body. One gets wet, yet one remains totally dry. At the Dead Sea the planet seems to be so full of itself that, fundamentally, it can only end. And, higher up, life appears to be a slip-up, a blunder, a precious imperfection.
First Publication: 7-1-2013
Modifications: 22-6-2013