Article
Manhattan, New York
The military helicopter has always raised fear in me. Its whole appearance speaks of war: to bring death, to destroy, to break. Ran Oron, a helicopter navigator, found that it is possible to ascend, or better said, to fly with a different mission: to look down and see the earth opening in front of his eyes, or imagination, new possibilities, not of destruction but of construction.It is not by chance that I chose the word tzir in the title. I assume that Ran Oron is aware of the different meanings that the word has in Hebrew: The tzir is the axis-mondi, the vertical column between earth and sky. It is the angel, the messenger from the heavens to the earth; upon the tzir the door opens and closes. And it is also the pain of a woman in labor. In order to combine these different meanings the imagination of a creator is needed (maybe there is an etymological connection between the word tzir and the word yetzira which means to create). As to Ran Oron, the creative imagination is the amazing combination of the flyer’s imagination observing from the skies the earth opening before his eyes, and the imagination of the architect: the one who builds his structure on the earth, in which the decisive principle in it is the tzir which opens and closes the doors of the building.I’m not a flyer, I don’t know what the flyer sees when he ascends to the heavens. As Oron says, each flyer of a helicopter when he looks at the map that he holds, folds it differently. The imagination of Oron, the architect, is what caused him to connect that act, of folding the map, to the act of construction. It is not only, the connection of these two different acts, it is also a connection of contrasts, or of protest; the builder, the artist in contrast to the military flyer, the destroyer.And thus I go back to the word tzir. I look at the structure that Oron built and see in it not only its physical presence, but also its other meaning – the poetic one: tzir sent from the heavens.
