FISH
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, 1930
So...No fins. No scales. No eye. A slab of grey marble, wide as your arms, balanced on a little white drum. The label says Fish. Good luck. Okay, but look at the veins. The white streaks in the stone. They all run one way, the long way, like water going past something quick. That's not paint. That's just what the marble looked like when it came out of the mountain. He saw a rock with the current already in it and went: there's my fish. And he explained this one, for once. When you see a fish, you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Carve the fins and the eyes and the scales, and you stop the movement. He wanted, he said, just the flash of its spirit. Walk around it once. From the skinny end it's nothing, a line. From the side it's huge. One angle, gone. Other angle, whole. It does that the way a fish does that. A fish with no eye, no mouth, no fins, and you still knew it in half a second. Turns out all that stuff was optional.