nature

In the Symposium, Plato explains the amorous passions of human beings in terms of the splitting apart of their essential idea, which takes place  in their celestial world: the divided (sectus=sex) soul of each individual thereby assumes a sexual nature and attains incarnation. And thus the principle for us upon earth is the desperate search for our own lost half. Paolo Mussat Sartor, not being able to cleave a living person in two, does just that, for example, with a peat, and by means of a piece of fruit he photographs (or realizes?) the operation which the philosopher had imagined in a daemon.
I do not know whether the persimmons, the apples, the mushrooms of Mussat Sartor are the hideous of the gentle sex, but in any case the he presents to us with monstrous technique the nostalgia for their vegetable unity. It is certain that whoever does not place his eye in front of the magnitying lens, instead of discovering in a melon the aspects of its “Soul itself”, will find only useless seeds.
And here guidance is offered by the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (III, 14, 3): “this Soul of mine within the heart is smaller than a grain of rice, a barley corn, a mustard seed, a grain of millet, the kernel of a grain of millet; this Soul of mine within the heart is greater than the earth, greater than the atmosphere, greater than the sky, greater than this worlds.” So, if he could, Mussat Sartor would make pumpin seeds as big as sun. Isn’t it a creative lens as well?

1973, Gianpiero Bona