Fragility by Carole Deltenre

It’s all so fragile, especially when the snow falls incessantly, thickening that fluffy white blanket of down on the stairs, railings, balconies, uncollected leaves, children’s playgrounds. And you think of the children, in those hospitals, without light, without electricity, of the newborn babies now in incubators by generators. About the lives that come and go because of violence. Of those lives that live only a few days or weeks, that disappear without ever seeing the light of day, of those lives that sometimes nobody ever finds out about, except one. But that one remembers every day. Once upon a time there was a detective called ‘The Grass Hides Everything’. It could be ‘Snow hides everything’, but everybody knows that no matter how much of it there is, it still ends. What is left is a fragile memory that usually never ends.

Carole Deltenre (France) says:

One in four pregnancies never happens. Everything is fragile, like wax, replicating the contours of the navel, yes, it’s not red flowers, it’s the place where the umbilical cord connects the mother’s body to the baby’s body, and every fourth piece of the necklace is plain, and that’s where the memory lies.

We consider the human being at the moment he is born, when the nourishing cord is cut. However, one in four pregnancies will not give birth to a living being. The empty settings are like traces of what has been, of what could have been, of what will not be or no longer be. The fragility of wax recalls the fleetingness of existence, silver the persistence of memory.


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