May #007. These figures were never meant to rest. They emerged from a period when I was still learning that language and body are not separate categories — that the letter carries musculature, that the symbol wants to move. What appeared here was a world where alphabet had undergone some ancient evolutionary pressure and grown limbs, armor, intention. The mechanical and the organic refusing to resolve into either.
What I understand now, looking back from the distance of years, is that this work was already asking the question False Symmetries would later formalize. The composition organizes itself around implied balance — figures answering figures, the diagonal shards creating a kind of bilateral architecture — and then systematically refuses to deliver it. Every time the eye finds a counterpart, the counterpart has done something different. One figure is mid-strike while its mirror is mid-recoil. The shards that should bisect the composition instead slide, almost imperceptibly, to one side.
This is not chaos. It is the specific tension of a pattern that knows its own rule and chooses, once, to break it with complete awareness. The monochromatic discipline enforces this — without color to distract, the asymmetry becomes the only weather in the image.
What moves me about this fragment is the suggestion that language already contains violence and grace in equal measure, that when symbols finally become bodies they do not achieve harmony but something more honest: perpetual, beautiful near-balance, always arriving, never quite there.
