inscendence

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

Josef Hoffmann, ‘Aufsatz’ centrepiece, model no. M sh 17. 1925-1931

A man stepped out from the group. He stepped into the water. He said: mi chamocha ba’eilim adonai? Who is like you Adonai, among the gods who are worshipped? He sang that verse over and over again. He sang it as he waded into the sea. He gave his body over to his faith as he walked. There was nowhere to go but forward. If he was going to die, he figured, and be equally dead either way, he was not going to die in slavery and he was not going to die at the hands of the Egyptians, either. He was going to die walking and singing, believing, trying to find progress in the chaos, in the waves. 

In the story, the water laps first at his feet, then his knees, his thighs, his ribs, his neck, finally flowing into his mouth as he sings and sings and sings. The words get choked, mispronounced: the hard cha of mi chamocha becomes mi kamoka, strangled but still certain. 

The constellations Lyra and Cygnus. The beauty of the heavens. 1842.

The Annunciation, Johann Michael Düchert , 1750s, Cleveland Museum of Art: European Painting and Sculpture

This object entered the collection attributed to the German sculptor Johann Paul Egell. However, this attribution never sat comfortably because Egell mostly worked on large-scale commissions in stone, stucco, and wood, rather than with these more precious materials. Recent research indicates that the work is by Düchert, one of Egell’s most gifted students, who translated Egell’s distinct visual language—the elongated figures, tiny heads, unusually flattened space, and planar handling of drapery—into small-scale ivories. Size: Framed: 56.5 x 41.9 x 6.3 cm (22 ¼ x 16 ½ x 2 ½ in.); Unframed: 33.5 x 25.4 x 3.5 cm (13 3/16 x 10 x 1 3/8 in.) Medium: ivory, ebony, velvet, in the original gilded and glazed frame