Balancing

With these new elements, the image ceases to be merely an “after-the-fact” scene and becomes a scene of real, almost experimental tipping, where intuitive laws, weight and causality, fall out of joint.
In the first image, horizontality prevailed. Even unstable, even precarious, the whole held within a readable form of balance. The wave played the role of a central pivot, an axis, almost the beam of a scale. The man, the dog, the donkey, each occupied a different position, yet the whole remained governed by a recognizable geometry. The world oscillated, but according to a still “human,” almost Newtonian logic.
In the second image, something breaks at that level. Balance is broken, but not as one might expect. The decisive point is indeed that the scale tips toward the dog. Not only has the man disappeared, but what remains, the small blue dog, light and almost marginal, becomes nearly the center of attention… in any case, a determining factor. Weight is no longer measured in mass, but in intensity. It is no longer the heaviest body that decides the inclination, but the one that concentrates the greatest tension or desire.
This introduces a new law: what makes the world tip is not what weighs the most, but what pulls the hardest. The dog, stretched toward the donkey, charged with a residue of relation, an unfinished appeal, becomes a paradoxical gravitational center. It embodies an affective or symbolic force that prevails over mere stability. The world tilts toward what asks, not toward what holds.
The donkey, for its part, is no longer the immobile figure of tranquil wisdom. Its backward movement is fundamental. The lifting of its forelegs signals surprise, perhaps even a form of unease. The donkey does not retreat because it fears the dog, but because the world suddenly no longer responds to the rules it knew. What was stable becomes unstable—not through agitation, but through a displacement of the very principles of balance. The donkey discovers that its patient posture is no longer sufficient to guarantee the coherence of reality.
This retreat of the donkey is precious: it prevents any simplistic moral reading. There is neither the victory of movement over stability, nor the revenge of instinct over wisdom. There is a shared astonishment. The dog is surprised to make the world tip. The donkey is surprised that the world can tip in this way. Neither is master of the situation.
The wave now accentuates this loss of bearings. It has changed direction. It is no longer merely the regular pivot of oscillation, but an unpredictable force. It no longer supports balance; it exposes it. As for the curvature of the earth, altered at the horizon in the first instance, it signals that it is not only the local scene that is changing, but the structure of the world itself. The horizon, which ordinarily promises continuity, becomes uncertain… even disappears. The ground no longer guarantees perspective.
If one connects this to what preceded, one can say that the effacement of the human has not restored a simpler order. On the contrary. The human, with its weight, its gestures, its speech, perhaps played a paradoxical stabilizing role—not through mastery, but through overload. Its absence releases subtler, less predictable forces that tip the whole in a different way.
This image thus says something even more radical: when habitual frameworks disappear, the world does not become lighter; it becomes more sensitive. Minimal forces—a look, an expectation—are enough to modify the global balance. This is no longer a balance of masses, but a balance of relations.
One might almost say that the dog, by remaining faithful to a bond when the human is no longer there, introduces an excess of meaning that makes reality tip. And that the donkey, by retreating, acknowledges that even the most deeply rooted wisdom must learn to compose with this new instability.
The scene is therefore neither a fall nor chaos. It is an experiment in fundamental disorientation, where the world reveals that its deepest equilibria rest not on what is visible, but on discreet, unpredictable forces that arise precisely when one believed everything had been simplified.