“Every single word, every single flower, every single look is but an infancy. Only babble could match the jabber inherent in real life, the latter’s incomplete articulation. No poem, no song, no piece of music, no art could escape that fundamental dislocation. There is no such thing as a complete word, a complete flower, a complete look … A genuine reading exceeds the text read, breaks its margins, goes far beyond it. The text is so to speak a miraculous medium meant to set up a new world through reading”. Roberto Juarroz (Roberto Juarroz)

“The strength of creative power has got no name. In the end, it remains mysterious. For where there is no innermost shaking brought about, there is no being mysterious either. That strength must be closely working together with matter in order to beget a real and life-bearing shape … Shaping, that’s life.” Paul Klee

58

“The unachieved is life” (said Jabès)

Compare the song of a tit with a Variation by Bach; compare its feathers with a haute couture dress; compare a beautiful sea-polished pebble, a nice mechanically polished decorative stone, the body of nice wheels … with a completed or, even better, an unfinished (Non finito) work of art like Rodin’s and Michelangelo’s. Whether natural or machined, beauty in Nature has got something complete, full, finished, achieved, perfect; whereas if beauty in sculpture can usher you into musing or nostalgia, it is because, most fortunately, it sometimes expresses the unachieved, refers you to unfulfilled desires and yearnings, stresses one’s lack of congruence with oneself and with the world (be it in a light, short-lived or heart-gripping manner –languidness, melancholy). Compared with a pebble, a sculpture seems to be an open and latent work; it conveys the unachieved part of a life yearning for and straining to its own achievement. First an act, then a work, sculpture allows the sculptor’s commitment to be perceived, as well as how he was under the spell and carried away to the present outcome that amounts to what he is, that amounts but to what he is, and that leaves him fulfilled and wishing for more and more. All the same, that work, that yearning of a stone soon sets to work on its onlookers, echoing their own yearnings and incompleteness, what makes them feel fulfilled and what they crave for, the present and what is impending.
(Translated by Michèle Bustros)