… nothing is so difficult to conceive as the body, flesh or stone …
This is from Rome: The First Book of Foundations by Michel Serres, translated by Randolph Burks (2015, 1983):
… Rome is not of the word like Athens; it is not of the book, of the breath or the written, like Jerusalem. Conversely it is not of water, like the first, nor of the desert, like the second. Rome is hard and dumb like rock, black like the bowels of a rock, never transparent like the pyramid or tetrahedron of Greek epiphany, never multiplied like Hebraic interpretation over the white space of the desert. Jerusalem is light and supple like a hundred thousand signs; Athens flies around the logos; Rome is heavy. It stutters, stammers, gestures; it never knows. It is of ritual, not of myth. The body holds the staff; it traces the temple and plinths; it doesn’t know why.
… The object grasped by Galileo requires two worlds, or rather two spaces and one time. The incandescent space of geometry and the black world of opaque mass. Nothing is so easy as understanding the first one; it is only there to understand and be understood; nothing is so easy to understand as the word, it’s there to be understood; but nothing is so obscure as the second one; nothing is so difficult to conceive as the body, flesh or stone, to understand as the noise that emanates from it; nothing is so difficult as knowing how it receives and envelops the light.
My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 