lorsque le vent se lève
terre 2005 h.40cm
cf. p.57: 2007 h.100cm


Pervading my sculpture with breath
      With a love-oriented inflatus


Would I be able to sculpt love
Lovers' presence for each other :
As discreet as a 'gentle breeze' *,
Their kisses, caresses, whispers **...?

Would I be able to suggest, as "the wind rises" their sighs, the gusts of their panting breaths … that used to fill my room like the thundering rapture, exclusive of all other noise, and would rise when my neighbour greeted her boy-friend?

Does it mean that my realism would therefore be provocative to the point of conveying the excesses of lust carrying lovers away, the hubris of damned souls in Dante’s and Rodin’s Infernos (***) their vehemence under tormenting adverse winds, the floods of flesh breaking loose amid violences ?

No. Instead, could I breathe a new grace and flesh into that fragile luxury, that frail luxuriant life –breath and spirit- that ample breathing out of a feeling of pleasure, where flesh and heart have their most vivid moving motions and where our best desires come into clear blossom ?

(*) That is Yahweh, such as he revealed himself to Elijah on Mount Sinai (Horeb) in 1Kings 19, 12). In the Hebrew biblical culture, “Ruah” is both breath and spirit –then the Holy Spirit, Love. The same God “formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”. (Genesis, 2, 7)
(**)The opening of The Song of Songs is all in whispers and hushing sounds : “YISHaqueni mineESHiquot pihou” –let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth”… Grace and inbreathing of the kisses.
(***)Lust damned in Dante’s Inferno (Hell) as Rodin sculpted it : “This place, bellowing like a raging sea given battle to by adverse winds. The never-lulling gale of hell blows off spirits in its squalls And spins them round and runs into them and harasses them … The sinners of the flesh, so I understood, were doomed to suffer that kind of torment.

(Translated by Michèle Bustros)

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