the beautiful foolishness of things

collaboration. the roots go back to the latin 'collaborare', which means: to work with ('com' + 'labore'). but is it possible that the work is no work at all, occurring as naturally as the flow of a river, and the 'with' - a dialogue in the mystery of the encounter?

I use Celan's words here, his famous description of the poem (which, however, can stand for every work of art) as an interplay between solitude and the Other:

'The poem is solitary. It is solitary and on the way. Whoever writes it is given to it for the journey. But does not the poem by that very fact, therefore already here, stand in the encounter – in the mystery of the encounter?

The poem wants to reach this Other, it needs this Other, it needs a vis-à-vis. (...) The poem becomes - and under what conditions - the poem of a person who, as before, perceives, who faces that which appears. Who questions this appearance and addresses it. The poem becomes dialogue...'

two banal water bottles, hanging on a string, in front of countless windows: such an encounter is implausible, if not genuinely absurd, and yet everything combines so well, that one is led to believe that nothing can be more natural, that this is the way things are, or, even more, should be. beauty emerges.

Michael Tweed, who maintains a fascinating However Fallible blog triptych (I think of them as a butterfly - his body and the wings, right and left, unity which can become a flicker, an ineffable tremble in the glimpse of a second), is a Canadian artist with a more than impressive portfolio. If I had to say only one sentence about his work, I would say that he makes art out of a bit of dangling string, then out of that art he makes a 'way', in the japanese sense, a 'do', a spiritual path. But this of course is a very poor way of speaking, there is no 'then' here, and no 'making': everything happens instantly, that very moment in which the line between the invisible and the visible becomes fluid and goes right through us, returning us to that which we truly are, the middle-ground between being and nothing. Merleau-Ponty's 'chiasme', and I hope he doesn't think I am too wrong here...
I remember the simple story of my Japanese pottery Master, who told me one quiet afternoon: 'I will rest when my hands have created the 無空有 bowl'. mu-ku-yu, a word coined by himself, 無 (void)空(emptiness)有(existence): the unity of being and non-being.
Michael Tweed's works are to me this space in which 無空有 reveals itself, in the glimpse of a second, the butterfly wings' flicker.

And now I can no longer postpone what I want to tell you: to my utmost amazement, Michael has invited me to collaborate with him on an ongoing project which blends my images and his zen-like poems written here from a rather surprising feminine perspective (yes, indeed!). Now you will certainly ask yourselves how these either too dark or too vivid pictures of mine, that entangled world of longing and despair, could possibly be a suitable companion for such an undertaking. I have done so myself. But against all odds, however implausible, if not genuinely absurd, this might appear, he thinks that it can work (and even talks of publishing one day!!!).

Let's see what you think about this foolish idea, which could perhaps, if we succeed, become a mirror to the beautiful foolishness of things.