On leaving the powerful retrospective of our favourite César
at Cartier, without ceremony she turned to us, some agitated
small, lively old lady: Amazing, unique! But
can you tell me why all those gilded cars and indeed
all those splendid big, speedily elegantly glimmering and mirroring things,
why he always so frightfully c o m p r e s s e s them, again and again with his thumb
so uncompromisingly and noisily squashes and every way presses them in on
themselv
es,
to
tally, till they’re
crumpled tin, till they’re scrap in the shock of some kind of serious accident
of all that? I don’t know,
with this, tonight I won’t even be able to sleep!
And we too had been deeply affected (you remember).
Conspiratorially we smiled at her and mutely shrugged our shoulders,
as a man & woman who had come through that happily.
Today I might perhaps say that all César’s lightning and
slow-motion, unrelentingly mangling compactions, all of those sudden
haltings of glitter and speed caused by sharp impact, all
of that ruthlessly cramming force of superhuman c o m p r e s s i o n
and squeezing right in on itself, perhaps does not come so much
from the fiery din and splinter-seconds of brutal car crashes,
but rather from the deep silence somewhere in us. And it sleeps on (in glass cases)
deep in those old, small, fragile, perfectly smooth sculptures by Rodin, which, guided and governed by some relentlessly
growing centripetal force of their introversion,
c o m p r e s s themselves, falling somewhere entirely inwards
in their own blissfully tense mystery.
In the day’s night we sleep. Tension grows.
César’s thumb is pointing upwards.