21

rings
There. At the heart of the matter he is sculpting in a hand-to-hand struggle, something is breathing him in. Sure enough, that matter cannot be dissociated from the full and voluptuous roundness of a woman’s body, the full outer roundness of her bosom, the hollow inner roundness of her womb. “That I may anew, all in a tangle in the gold flecking of your sand, go to the shore of your body, in the very slow breaking of your unfurling clay rings, and there be lingering.” (St John Perse).

There : his favourite sculpture. While it shapes up in his eyes and in his hands, those rings bind him up in attachment and keep him so, so that he travels right across the whole spectrum that goes from the infinite to the infinitesimal, for those rings of spellbinding and surpassing greatness can also tighten their narrow grip on him. What an amazing work ! Here he is, grappling with his clay or his stone, hollowing them out, and internalizing them as much as he provides them with an interior; doing so, he becomes enamoured : his innermost depths, his heart of hearts, gets filled up with the love that seized him (é-prendre) and made a dwelling in him. As he now penetrates, he is ushered through the mystery veil into the huge vault of the primitive cave with its entrancing walls, into the nave of that cathedral where a large rose window is enclosed.


Ushered even farther up a stream of millions of linking up years, into the vastness of space, with its planet rings, its galaxies coiling up in scrolls … What else is he sculpting but those immensities that he tries to proportion to his own human scale and convey in a slim rod of a moulding, in a humble scooped-out ring-shaped material, “this hard circular matter that binds one up in attachment and keeps one so” as does the nuptial ring on one’s finger, as does her womanly embrace round his manly happiness ? A song then rises, a Song of Songs by a “king held captive in (the Shulamite’s) tresses”. (in The Jerusalem Bible, Ch 7, v 6,).

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)