Initial reading…

 
« My body is therefore, within the totality of the material world, an image that acts like other images, receiving and returning movement. But this image has a particular feature: it seems, to a certain extent, to choose the way in which it returns what it receives. It adds nothing to what it receives, but it subtracts. It does not create movement; it delays it or deflects its effect.
Between the received excitation and the executed reaction, there is a zone of indetermination. This indetermination is not a void: it is filled with latent activity, with a tension that can be resolved in several different ways. The system functions, but it hesitates.
This hesitation itself is the condition of novelty. It is not a rupture in the continuity of movements; it is a variation in their distribution. Where everything was transmitted mechanically, something is reflected, delayed, modified. And this modification alone is enough to make an unprecedented mode of action appear.»

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Depending on how one looks at things, each way of seeing, however different it may be from the others, may have its own merits. Activity is already there—diffuse, distributed, sustained by constant exchanges. Neuronal populations fire according to rhythms that have stabilized over time. Energy circulates, potentials compensate each other, loops close without apparent effort. Nothing yet calls to be formulated. The system functions.
Then something shifts, very slightly, in the way this activity is distributed. A synchronization ceases to be perfectly regular. An oscillation gains amplitude in a specific area. It is neither an excess nor a defect. It is a local variation within an ensemble that had, until then, been coherent.

Initial reading…
At first glance, this image might seem to stage an immediately legible, almost archetypal tension between human imbalance and animal stability, between an angular world and an organic world in which emptiness would have its place. On the left, a man in a suit, hat raised, slips or falls along abrupt rocks—red and purplish—that evoke an unstable architecture, a wall, or a theatrical set too rigid to accommodate a living body. The gesture of lifting the hat, both polite and absurd, suggests an attempt to maintain social dignity at the precise moment it collapses. This is not a violent fall, but a loss of grip: the man is no longer carried by the world he inhabits. And yet… an ambiguity immediately sets in.
At the center, a narrow plank—or is it really one?—serves as a passage. It does not truly connect two shores; it suspends… itself suspended. It is a fragile, almost absurd line, recalling both the tightrope walker’s wire and the sentence on which a text advances. One senses the precariousness of the link, the constant possibility of tipping over. Beneath this plank, a spiral motif suggests an older, deeper movement, like an underground current or a coiled memory—in short, a wave indifferent to surface figures.
On the right, the animal. A donkey sits, oriented toward the man without aggression. Where the human slips, the animal is stable. Its posture expresses neither threat nor explicit rescue, but an attentive presence. It embodies a form of stability that is neither moral nor social, but bodily—instinctual, and at the same time almost geological. The ground beneath it appears continuous, unproblematic, as if the world allowed itself to be inhabited by those who do not seek to dominate it symbolically.
The composition thus opposes two regimes of existence. On one side, the human caught in forms that are too rigid, too conceptual, which end up rejecting him. On the other, the animal attuned to a fluid, nocturnal, almost cosmic space. The dark sky and violet mountains reinforce this reading: the setting is not realistic, but mental, like an inner topography.
Symbolically, the image can be read as a failed passage. The man attempts to cross toward animality—this is only a hypothesis—or toward another way of being in the world, but he arrives burdened with unnecessary social signs: the suit, the hat, which weigh him down. The animal, by contrast, has nothing to prove. It is already where it is. What finally strikes one is the absence of intention. The animal does not save the man; the man does not reach the animal. The image suspends the moment when balance is lost, without a final fall. It leaves the viewer in that in-between space, exactly on the plank: a place where what is at stake is less a drama than a silent question about what, in us, still knows how to stand.