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That unbearably cool neo-Platonic philosopher Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (5th cent.), interpreted very cleverly Plotinus’s analogy of a sculptor hammering beauty out of a rock and wrote that the mystic practices a sort of “aphairesis”, that is: he strips, or cuts away all the unnecessary stuff from his self in the same way in which a sculptor would cut away shards and slabs out of a marble block to suddenly reveal the beauty of the figure hidden inside. For the profane, the gestures of the sculptor are meaningless. He just seems to hammer at the stone at random. But his senseless gestures will abstract beauty out of the rock.

So next time someone criticizes me for being lazy and unstructured and seemingly doing meaningless actions with no obvious purpose, day after day, I know what to tell them: my insane gestures cut out slabs from the granite of the day in order to reveal the beauty hidden inside. Just give me enough time. It’s not for nothing that my motto is : J’interpelle le quotidien!…

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