Quarry

            Pausing on a familiar road, a terrible uncertainty overwhelms me.  It passes immediately but leaves me with a feeling of unease.  Near where I am standing, the imperceptible movement of a root has pushed through the foundations of a wall.  For as long as I can remember this root has been here, yet today its familiarity appalls me.  The closer I study my surroundings the more strongly mounts the fear that I have lost my way.

Out of the corner of my eye, on the periphery of my senses, something is obscured.  Illumination bounded by darkness.  Blindness undermining sight.  Suddenly I am aware of my hands touching the surface of the wall.  The resistance of the wall is as horrifying to me as if my hands had passed straight through it.  It is laughable that touch should corroborate sight; that one sense could confirm another.  I have just enough presence of mind to stop myself turning round to see if anyone is watching me.  But when I awaken in the morning, alone in my room, there shall be the same fear, the same uncertainty.

 What is Creation but the creation of death; the wresting of the finite from the infinite?  For if there were no finite bodies there would be no death.  In a circle the end is inscribed at the beginning and every point along the way is also the end.  And yet death is stasis, the present, for it has no duration.  Death is the form that is circumscribed by life.

In a sealed room, yet a draft stirs a petal from the table.  It rises up once then falls, and the draft which animates the petal with life, with movement and moment, is no more than its momentum, from death and toward death.  One day the room itself will fade and all will be again as it was before.

The vanity of our actions must be known not at their conception but at their conclusion; that is their vanity.  In life we are always past doing otherwise.  Vainly do I strive for the instant, the instant before thought, before action; I literally cannot even conceive of its existence. While we live, we do not live in the present but in the future, always in the next moment.  Vanity and death pre-exist us.  If I would truly comprehend vanity I must inhabit this present, this cessation before the movement, this moment of death.

In a world of finite bodies, in a world of movement formed upon death, the artwork renders a further act of creation by wresting the form from its finitude.  Form arrests the movement, composes it.  And the artwork exists in the instant before the future.  It speaks to us from the very edge, out of our intuition of death.

There are moments when silence has the loudest voice; when absence consumes us.  The essence of form is that it is precisely what it is not.

STEPHEN BEAR

Quarry was published in Next Level, Vol 2 no 1 in 2003.

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