"Last will and Testament" by Mariusz Hermanowicz (with Zygmunt Hermanowicz) was an instant crush for me.
After his father's death, Mariusz Hermanowicz discovers, among the things the father left, boxes filled with fishing lures of his father's own design. Some of the lures are finished, many seem more like prototypes, projects. There are also drawings, parts, materials. A universe of lures.
The father, you see, loved fishing. But he was never satisfied with the lures he had. He kept saying how he would make some of his own, which would allow him to catch many more fish. And kept picking things up from the ground, saying they would be perfect for the lure. "But I had never heard that he ever started doing anything from the things he found".
So what are these objects? Have they ever been used? Were they supposed to be used?
"Did he ever try to catch fish with them? Would any fish get caught on them?"
I am in love with this project.
Need I say more?
Would you like me to rationalize love?
(Of course, if you are reading any of this, it is because, like readers of poetry, you believe words go far beyond any silly logos-stories.)
Here are my quasireasons, then:
I love that violence can turn into passion which can turn into art.
The ideal sublimation.
The utopic idea that someone can move from aggression to beauty.
The uncertain heritage. The ambiguity of what remains.
I guess, it is also the ambiguity of what is already there, of what we do, of our own motivations.
The bait transforms into the fish.
The challenge of seducing the fish becomes the fish's seduction.
The man identifies with the fish to the extent that these little pieces of metal, plastic and wood become a representation of fish, or more, like African masks, they are now a reality of their own, with their peculiar morphology and purposeful abstraction.
Yet there is nothing pragmatic about this purpose. There is madness in this reason.
It is a mad inner dialogue with a fish that will never be caught. The fish that blissfuly remains the being-to-correspond. Transforming these carefuly selected pieces of material into the lure that caught me.
