Among the statuettes scattered in crèches during Christmas in the direction of Provence, frozen more than the other characters, figures the Enraptured One. An outside observer, naïve, he scarcely enters into the scene, and, like each of us, was passing through there: suddenly nailed to the ground, no matter where, dumbfounded, staggered, petrified by what he sees, motionless, stopped because sent into transports; here he is climbing to the third heaven and so a part of the holy scene. He has, like everyone, his feet on the ground and his head in the divine.
An evidently motionless statue seems to move, so much does its gesture vibrate: life stabilizes by finding its seat, while stone, in deviation from equilibrium, finds a dynamic.1 A double paradox of a living motion that stops and an inert repose that rushes forward, of an organism that’s sleeping or dying and a raw material that’s waking or resurrecting: it’s not enough to say or describe linguistic figures to understand this present. It’s not even enough to read static statuary and the act that frees itself from it in the word “ecstasy.” Yes, rapture immobilizes and transports. In mysticism lies one of sculpture’s secrets, as a religious source and sometimes as a reason for its captivating beauty. Ecstasy makes either the body or the soul fly, but adds tons to the body it enraptures. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi with a single light step went to the cymae but grew so heavy sometimes that ten strong persons couldn’t move her. It’s not enough to say or recount. Bernini had to sculpt Saint Teresa in ecstasy, compact, ethereal.
However deeply my thoughts or the ideas of others I’ve been able to share may have plunged, as much intoxication as certain discoveries or great inventions I’ve been able to understand may have lavished on me, however musical my sentences or the created beauties I’ve been able to contemplate may have sounded, however perfectly happinesses may have been able to present themselves, I’ve always known, with a sovereign intuition, that these events happened like islands for he who sails and that, beneath this rarity that could be lacking, a table, a pedestal, a continuous support existed, like a peaceful and gentle security where ever-present beauty is the other name of intelligent light and joy.
Wiser people than me have named the superabundant continent I see and where I sometimes live: God, being, heaven, truth, or philosophy, but have always affirmed that this other world merges with this one, the simple and profound reality of things.
Angels, envoys, messengers, carried them there without their feet touching the ground—proof that there is no route or method leading there; archangels or cherubim accompanied them there to have them look over its layout and towers, and they were so happy there that they thenceforth deemed themselves émigrés or nomads wandering in the ordinary terrestrial valley when they returned, forced one day to go back home: they wondered what they were doing there.
So, however deeply their thoughts may have penetrated, as much intoxication as they may have received from a work, however beautiful several rare pages may seem, they know that these remain pieces, wreckage, from a certain shipwreck on that voyage.
All movement here below, mobility or immobility, only makes them train beforehand for a new angel-winged departure toward their hoped-for space.
Naïve, having lost their heads. Enraptured. Ecstatic before what happens in the world.