In breaking ever so slightly, symmetries have driven out determinism and given life a direction and a first meaning. It is a narrow, limited path, with liberties that offer us possible choices; most of these have moral consequences since regressions are possible. A bad choice, the choice of death for example, can drive us to a temporal determinist evolution.

Allow me to offer another reflection on the meaning of life, one among many. Rebecca Horn is a Berlin artist, and her exhibition:



suggests to me an interpretation wherein art becomes as much a search for truth as an æsthetic search.

Sixteen inverted baskets, suggesting hives, project a luminous beam on broken, revolving circular mirrors. Sometimes, they project it onto aquatic disks with a stick breaking the water’s surface, i.e. breaking the mirror symmetry, with the same effect.

A poem is projected onto these broken mirrors: “The bees have lost their balance…”. The deformed letters appear on the walls and ceiling. Were the mirrors not broken, you could read the poem upside-down, but, alas, the message is completely unintelligible because the letters are stretched in one direction or another, here compressed, there swollen and tortured. In this sort of second-degree art, what matters is not what the artist shows us, as there is little to contemplate! The power of the work lies in this hidden message which, in a flash, becomes obvious: “In dissymmetry, meaning is lost.” It is a beautiful lesson in modern ethics, expressed through an art that makes that which we do not see spontaneously more obvious. So? Would recovering the symmetries also mean recovering the meaning of life and recovering a certain harmony?