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Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and
painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to
give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole
landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a
while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a
better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you
pretended to be doing the whole sky.
text: Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
image: Toward the Blue Peninsula, Joseph Cornell
1951-52 (120 Kb); Construction, 10 5/8 x 14 15/16 x 3 15/16 in; Collection Daniel Varenne, Geneva
One mourner says if I can just get through this year as if salvation comes in January.
Slow dance of suicides into the earth:
I see no proof there is anything else. I keep my obituary current, but believe that good times are right around the corner
Una grande scultura posse rotolare giù per una collina senza rompersi, Michelangelo is believed to have said (though he never did): To determine the essential parts of a sculpture, roll it down a hill. The inessential parts will break off.
That hill, graveyard of the inessential, is discovered by the hopeless and mistaken for the world just before they mistake themselves for David's white arms.
They are wrong. But to assume oneself essential is also wrong: a conundrum.
To be neither essential nor inessential - not to exist except as the object of someone's belief, like those good times lying right around the corner - is the only possibility.
Nothing, nobody matters.
And yet the world is full of love
