The Immeasurable: The Soul

Marilena Nardi, From the series "The Gloom", December 9, 2016.

Do we have a soul?

That we cannot answer scientifically. Indeed science may be the wrong place to be asking from, according to the artists before us. The calculating eye will see a fission taking place. The release of energy, when cleaving into parts.

That is, however, only half the story. The one part will be invisible. The other shall perish. That is too neat to define life.

Xawery Dunikowksy, The Soul Escaping the Body, 1918, at Królikarnia.
Photo by Niels Larsen, May 2018.

Life is in the fusion. The pain of opposites; amalgamated by high temperatures and made present by the dirty laws of gravitational pressure.

The separation while fighting for union, or the fission of fusion, is an explanation fully graspable in artistic terms. Impossible to be explained, it is right there before us in the fight for form.

Marilena Nardi, October 20, 2012.

The cartoons shown are courtesy of Marilena Nardi and must not be reproduced without her permission.