This
like a full-scale reproduction
of ice
that recalls the official drawing of a snowflake.
The symmetry of lines not in the snow:
let them be long nails. Let white feathers lie between them.
As they grow bigger
they realize what it means to grow bigger: f r a g i l i t y .
Which makes crisscrossing lines read—snow.
How many lines on a piece of paper does it take to see it,
someone asks, watching the snow fall outside the window.
Then he glances across his drawing to one he's just made
of an animal.
What does a one-year-old child see in a pen's mark
so that she says—meow—when she points to it?
When does that drawing
begin to be a cat?
He leaves the two dimensions of the drawing and comes back to the three
dimensions of the afternoon,
of the full-scale reproduction of ice.
A sculpture.
A sculpture made perpetual what was fleeting.
But if something grows on the cheek of a sculpture
grass for instance, it can make fleeting the perpetuity of iron.
To make fleeting what is perpetual, a consumer good
that used to last forever:
radio, table, house. Overconsumption affects the sculpture.
What is perpetual
and its defense
against consumption and its owners.
Perpetuity is revolutionary.
Perpetuity is f r a g i l e .
Like ice
when depicted in a sculpture.
Sculpture
Enrique Winter
translated from the Spanish by Mary Ellen Stitt
