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The Priest – 1861

 

FotoHe had lived in the rectory for over 35 years. When he had arrived to take care of the parish, people had soon introduced him to their daughters for he was young, unmarried, of a well known family. But he had kept to himself, had dedicated his time to his parish and his academic studies. He was especially interested in the work of a catholic lawyer, philosopher and counter-revolutionary, Joseph de Maistre, mainly his Essai sur le principe générateur des constitutions politiques et des autres institutions humaines (“Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions,”). He was intrigued by de Maistre’s doctrine that war and the shedding of blood were necessary for the expiation of sin. Also that sin was inevitable, that physical evil is the necessary corollary of moral evil, expiated and lightened through prayer and sacrifice only. These ideas resonated with him in a very deep and personal way, he was severe and unforgiving and so were his sermons. He had to redress these ideas to make them acceptable to the views of his own church, and it hurt him personally to offer forgiveness for mere remorse in the name of Christ. Over time, as he became older and his severity started to show in the deep lines in his face and the emaciated appearance of his body, people started to fear him and went out of his way where possible. There were no more attempts to introduce him to an unmarried daughter or niece and less invitations to other social events, which was a welcome development in his eyes, as it provided him with more time for his studies. He suspected himself to be prone to a weakness that both churches would have condemned and was relieved that in consequence of his social isolation there was only limited temptation to give in to his desires. If one of his young male students would catch his attention in this unwelcome manner, he treated the boy with special unkindness to keep at a safe distance. While his philosophical comprehension and reasoning deepened over the years, recorded in countless journals, he did not manage to overcome his burden, and realized that he actually suffered more severely from it the older he got. This in turn supported his views on the inevitability of evil, for as evil he regarded his infliction, but also as unavoidable, as nothing he had done to purge himself from it had been successful. His life was complicated and joyless for the most part.
He did take an avid interest in the building of the new church that was to replace the old wooden steeple. It’s neo-gothical style resonated with his ideas about a purer world and society. He contributed generously to its building cost out of his inheritance as had other wealthy landowners in the parish. The new church was a symbol at the same time of their moral purity and economical wealth. His contribution was so significant that he was chosen to model for the statues that were to be put on the roof and overlook the parish. The idea of watching over the life of the parish from a far distance appealed to him. The last winter before the completion of the new church he had an encounter with a stranger who had called upon him repeatedly and who was staying at the town’s only inn. He was dressed in simple, yet elegant clothes, cut out of fine, dark cloth. In a small town a stranger like this would normally have generated a great deal of curiosity. But he was so quiet and unassuming in his manner as to almost appear invisible. He went for daily visits to the rectory where he was served tea and would have long conversations with the pastor. The elegance of his appearance was so convincing that it took a while for the pastor to notice that the stranger wore but a kind of biblical footwear, close to being shoeless.
It was late fall. The trees were brilliantly red as if with religious fervor. The pastor felt alert, alive almost as if a lifetime of doubt and study suddenly held some promise, as if the dark aspects of his life were less weighing on him. Then the stranger came down with a severe flu which delayed his departure. High fevers made him delirious, and the doctor and priest both were called to soothe the rage which seemed to devour the man who had been a quiet guest until he came down with this fever. After three days he lost his consciousness and did not regain it. He died in the fourth night without the pastor at his side. The pastor himself was delirious in fever at this time and died only two days after the stranger.

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Mud people (excerpt from Gargoyle)

fullsizeoutput_b93 The shallow hole the boy had dug became deeper with time as he scooped out the red colored clay the ground was made of. He filtered it through his hands, taking out stones, sticks, decomposed leaves and roots. Punching and smoothing it he compacted the clay to one block, thus slowly building up a monolith from clay. He devoted great care to this process, making sure that he would have a structurally sound mass with which to work. Over the course of building hundreds of small people from mud he had gotten quite skilled at this craft. Only when he was content with the sound that a slap against the block produced, a deep, saturated thud, would he proceed to sculpt. With deliberate slowness he worked from the general form to the details. Many times a form had collapsed when he had tried to overemphasize a movement or had placed the limbs too far outside the center of gravity. In the beginning he had tried to use sticks to support an arm reaching out or a leg stepping forward and though technically that solution had worked he didn’t like that the figure now seemed to defy the laws of gravity that nature put on the material and form. It was thus almost impossible by the mere use of sticks and clay alone to sculpt an outreached limb that looked natural. So he had returned to work from the inner core of the material and to rather hint at a movement that – though invisible – the eye would project into the empty space. He was always intrigued by what he could see without seeing it. He liked the way his sculptures randomly related to one another, all he had to do was to quietly look at both sculptures and discover this relationship of forms. Something deep inside him stirred when he looked at his creations and their silent endurance. He could see the form of the space in between two physical forms, it was nothing and yet visible if one cared to look, it changed constantly, stretched and diminished, even disappeared. It was actually easier for him to comprehend the properties of this in between space than the form itself. You could get out of the trajectory of any moving object if you controlled that space. If you made that space in between adhere to your inner voice you did not need sticks to build a figure. Why, you barely needed your hands, all you had to do was to look long and hard, look at the clay monolith and make some slight adjustments. Soon his people were crouching, stretching, running, turning. He took great pleasure from this.

His father began to take notice too. One night when he had returned home from the workshop the little garden patch had first caught his attention. In the twilight the clay sculptures his son had build in the afternoon had a strange quality of perfection. There were seven fresh sculptures, six of them crouching on the ground, the seventh a small figure in flight, emerging out of a block of brick-colored earth, running.
From a distance it had seemed that all sculptures possessed distinct personalities and bore individual facial features. Something about these features seemed oddly familiar to the stonemason. Upon closer inspection he realized though that the impression of an actually sculpted face dissipated from a nearer perspective – but reinstated itself the moment he stepped back like a magical trick. The inability to confirm his initial finding, to come closer to the truth, was intriguing to him. He asked himself how a not yet six year old child could have created such a sophisticated illusion. He didn’t ever doubt that the impression was created deliberately. He studied the people his son had made for a long time. Inside the house the light from the boy’s bedroom shone dimly through the drawn curtains.

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Time itself took notice of the unlikely creature

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“I  will be back.” Was it even meant to be a promise or rather the a mere, impulsive expression of an intent? The gargoyle pondered this question over many days, even weeks after the mason had left. He remembered the exact  sound of the words, their intonation, the expression of the mason’s face, the thoughtful gathering up of the tools, the turn of the head to once again rest his eyes upon the face of the stone creature, the final words – the gargoyle relived all of these moments and weighed them, day after day.

Every day up to midday he collected small reasons why chances were good that the man should appear this day, after midday he thought of excuses why he could not possibly have made it possible to come this day but would surely be able to fit it in tomorrow or at least before the week, the month , the season was over.

Perhaps the last gargoyle had been lonelier than he had cared to admit previously or maybe this obsession with the return of the mason was just yet another way to pass time.

Waiting for something to happen, somebody to appear, seemed to be far superior to just being, even if it infused his previously peaceful existence with a permanent sense of pain, a feeling that was so close to boredom that at times he would have been unable to distinguish it.

Boredom or pain both compromise our sense of regular time passing and whereas a day had just been a day, an hour just an hour before the advent of meaning and desire (now time had a direction, time existed so the mason could bridge it, so the gargoyle could subtract minutes from the greatest distance that separated him from the return, the moment when the mason had finally turned his back on him and left the roof), now a day could be excruciatingly long, especially if the gargoyle thought to have detected sounds coming from behind the closed roof door.

Expectation, gladness, desire, wishfulness, frustration, even despair were all variations on the same theme, waiting. Waiting in turn meant the refusal to accept time for what it was; it was like a progressing illness. It never occurred to the gargoyle to abandon his unreasonable expectation and to return to stone nature in order to gain the peace he longed for. Peace seemed attainable only if his curiosity about the reason for the return of the mason could be satisfied. Time passed and the mason did not return. Eventually the initially glad expectation turned into a numb pain, over time seemingly removed from any cause. A general disappointment  overcame the gargoyle, the most human of feelings, as if something that had been promised to him was now purposefully being withheld. It was as if his existence was gradually being tainted by something he could neither name nor really be completely sure of.

Time itself took notice of the unlikely creature and inexorably started gnawing at him with tiny teeth. The  gargoyle still formulated his thoughts in human phrases. But instead of patiently following a thought until it moved just out of grasp and then starting all over again like a child, he had taken to a summarizing his thoughts in a more generalist way, often colored by self-pity. A second rate stone poet he was now, defeated and ridiculous, utterly grown-up and utterly human. He felt contempt for himself, for his dependence, his passive waiting, his pathetic obsessiveness but he couldn’t help himself. There was no way to stop. No way to stop waiting. Tiny cracks were forming in the rough granite surface. Defeat was looming.

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Transformative forces

 

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He  was but a gargoyle, a stone image.  How the gift of sentient observation had come to him he did not know any more than man knew where the soul originated. From his place on the roof he observed people, adults and children alike and marveled about the passage of time. After years and years of observation, of overheard fragments of conversation that the wind had carried up in the same unreliable and moody way he carried a fragrance like a caress or deposited leaves and debris in the gutter, from years of watching children grow up and age, he had concluded that humans were born with many gifts only to shed them with the years until nothing of value was left. Adults to him, the steadfast observer, were a manifestation of a process of  deterioration of their former promise.

There seemed something broken about adults to him, men and women alike, as if the original balance of their design had been spoiled. He liked children perhaps because they seemed unaware of the passage of time. He observed with pleasure as a seven year old girl straining under the weight of a watering can that she had been sent to fill up at the pump stopped in her tracks and put down the watering can only to pick up a small, white pebble to examine with great  interest and sincerity as if she had struck treasure. Another day he had observed  a young boy crouching on the path in an  immobile position for close to an hour, a long time in human count, to closely look at the street of ants entering the church underneath the granite slab step of the back door. It was the same ant street, as  wide as the arm of the local butcher,  that the custodian had failed to banish form the grounds even after many years of relentless and poisonous battle.

Every now and then, from his precarious precipice the gargoyle observed a kid  blinking up into the grey light of an early Northern spring day, scanning the gargoyle’s own dark silhouette against the diffusely bright clouds.  He had never seen any adult lift their head to actually study the structure and ornamentation of the church. It was children only, children  possessing the gift of timelessness by focussing on something small just outside their reach and holding on nonetheless, thereby transcending the moment that was forced upon them by wisdom or mere whim of the ruling adults in their lives. And all that time he was waiting just as they were waiting, existing in limbo, in a state of not knowing, waiting to be unbound, for his fate to be revealed to him, and yet dreading it, dreading it was but a process of diminishing, of deterioration just as the passage of time exemplified by human behavior seemed to indicate.  And yet, there were moments he still believed in the transformative forces of time and light.

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Fall from Grace / excerpt from a new novel, working title: the stone mason

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For the stonemason in particular the death of his stillborn son felt like a betrayal. It was as if he had livd in the never acknowledged faith that his profession granted him some kind of special reprieve from death, that someone had agreed to that it was not to occur in his private life as long as he continued to carve memorials for the dead, and that this someone now had let him down. He was an atheist in the service of the church and loosing his unborn child felt like a disciplinary measure for his godlessness. Like many atheists he had a system of inner convictions that replaced religion. He did not believe in a creator, an organizer, a final judge, and yet he felt like he had fallen from grace.

Iris quietly  lived in the shadow of their loss, simply mourning and nourishing the inconceivable thought that they should now never know him, their son, certainly not by the way of a new pregnancy as friends and relatives suggested. These well-meaning people did not realize that the depth of her grief was rooted in the very circumstances that they thought would alleviate the loss – the fact that neither she nor anybody else had ever seen this child alive; that it had in fact never been born in the true sense as he had died in utero. Her grief was that her child had lived, if ever so briefly, unknown to her, and that she would never know it. She sat at the kitchen table with her encyclopedia and with a three hair sable brush paint stamp-sized paintings on miniature panels of oak wood while thinking about all the small things she would not ever know about her son. She wouldn’t know his face. She wouldn’t know the sound of his voice. She would never hear him laugh. She would never hold him in her arms. And yet he had lived.

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The Twelve Nights of Christmas, night ten: Raw data or further reflections on the nature of Borges Library

ImageI’d like to think of drawing as of transforming raw data with my pen to “mean” a specific thing and not another though it is not in the nature of data to actually be one specific thing to the exclusion of all other possible “things” (meaning, manifested form, reality) in all their variations (written and unwritten) any more than a child’s building block used in a fleeting structure soon to be knocked over is identical with that intended structure’s purpose or “meaning”. A building block stays a building block, a zero stays a zero and a one stays a one no matter what it is used to communicate. It assumes  a participating function in the meaning of one thing ( and not another ) but it also creates that one thing without adopting its separate ( separate from other possible thing’s) nature simply by describing it.  The “thing” actually has no separate ( from other possible thing’s) nature – it is but a description of the configuration of the raw data (building blocks) at a specific moment from a specific perspective. So that, at any given moment, any thing, rearranged, could be (and is) any other thing, idea, let’s call it “book”, existing or non-existing, written and unwritten, in all possible variations. I assume that would upon further reflection have to be one of the conclusions drawn of the cosmology principle but I am getting a bit out of my depth here.

All we ever do in life is  to assume a specific perspective to describe what is really a homogeneous distribution of raw data – each one of us is, with other words, but a specific, erratic close up view of that homogeneous distribution. We have no separate nature. The “separateness” of our nature not only of one thing to the exclusion of all other possible things but also of the experiencing “conscience”, the “I” to the exclusion of all other possible perspective’s (you, the other) is clearly illusional, possibly delusional.

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The Twelve Nights of Christmas, night 9: A rip in the fabric of the universe reveals the true nature of time

It is Borges’ library that makes another appearance in this drawing meditation. One of the themes that is never far off my mind. How does our mind chooses the images that are essential for its own comprehension of the world? How come an image such as Borges library can be so powerful that it assumes an reality of its own, in an alternate universe not so far of our own house number? Just try a different key, open a small door you have never quite paid attention to before and beyond you will find the octagonal library with all possible version of all possible books, written and unwritten … my kind of paradise.
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The twelve Nights of Christmas – Night eight – Yggdrasil

 

It can’t be helped, I guess, but once in the twelve nights Yggdrasil is bound to show up. I do not observe Ragnarök, I do not live by the old Norse Tales nor by their subscription into a modern version of a quasi religious substitute – and yet, how would one meditate on the twelve nights and not be prone to illustrate the one tree, that tree of the beginning of the world. That time might be like a tree, unfolding in a strictly, beautifully logical pattern, giving form to light, seems like a fitting observation of the old and well worth remembering. Incorporated in this drawing are the elements of an architecture unfolding by a beautiful, strictly logical pattern, giving form to an idea about time.Foto

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the day the shadows disappeared

Mahabaratha, detailthe shadows were moving slowly, swaying like branches in a light breeze or high buildings on a windy day. to detect purpose in these gentle movements required a slight degree of paranoia, and yet there was no apparent natural cause to explain the shift of the shadows away from their corresponding objects and towards the center of the village like water draining from upset glasses.
finally, there were just a bits of shadow left, like drops in a sink adhering to the enamel by their surface tension. these droplets of shadow were sparkling like rainbows, no grayness reflected. the air was still and non-expectant, noon in a depressed small town, and the realization that the world was without shadows had not yet sunk in. in a dirty jeep, parked close to the village center, a woman lit a marlboro
even those who had dismissed the shadows as inessential, felt disconcerted when the birds ceased to sing. on the morning of the third day, after a dawn without luminosity had given way to dull day light, small insects began their crawling procession towards the centers that had swallowed the shadows.
and someone laughed at the gray man in his wrinkle free woolen suit who solicited signatures on retro-active insurance policies. “one day only”, he implored, “an amazing offer”, but they shooed him away while watching the myriad of tiny, scarlet colored spiders tie a living ribbon between the outskirts of the village and the shadow drain.
and yet, the spiders said, too easily do you accept that we form a living ribbon, and wander into oblivion. one by one. what to your eyes a living ribbon is, to ours is a band of pain, and joy, and hope against all odds.