33

A STELE IN JOBOURG

In our society that refuses to acknowledge death, most French people (80%) evidently choose to be laid in a tomb : as their last dwelling and full dress, their final, belief-bearing word; as what they confess, what they express unintentionally, not even caring to state it; eventually, as what a profitable and powerful market has every opportunity to drive them to express for the sake of decorum (and of an industrial logic). And many are those among them who deeply regret that fashionable language, that systematic manner of expression, which, like weeds clinging to what is overgrown by them, proves most poor and wanting when life has been drawn to a close. Unless the sculpture contrives to rouse words nearer to individual feelings and thus able to stave off what is meaningless in death. Impudent.

Here, at the tip of the Cherbourg Peninsula (Normandy), stands a double stele for a couple’s burial plot : two leaves of an opening door; the chink of a distance between them allows the sunrise to stretch across the flowerbed (June 2006).

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)