Stones May 2021
I spent most of the last year sitting in front of a tall double window that looks out on a courtyard-garden filled with stones. “Gravel” is what we call it when a truck pulls up and empties its load and men rake it out over a 40’x80’surface. “Pebbles” when they
Names of types of stones
Legna rotta Infilled: intarsia, litografia Tiny sfinge Madonnas Something is emerging Glued by time and force Discovery of golden tongues Blooms of stone O quickly fading x in my more slowly fading hand If you don’t like it wait 10 million years
Some stones prefer not to be photographed
I always look serious/It steals the soul/bad hair day/not today/I believe in impermanence/I’m ugly/it prioritizes the visual /it’s against my beliefs/ touch me instead
Stones are
Stones are imprisoned by other stones Are being born out of stones Are sending messages from within other stones Are assimilated integrated, hybrid, or in conflict Were once squeezed together so tightly. Are in a multi-million-year process of argument and adjustment Or have come to rest, as in my courtyard, and have come mostly to know
How rocks are like cinema
In lockdown, in lieu of going to the movies, I watched rocks coming and going very very slowly, in a time frame longer than movies, even longer than lockdown. I studied each rock hoping to see how it is in the process of disappearing and how it is evolving into
Centrale Montemartini
Lo how the mighty. There’s ex-mightiness all around here, the might of the grand machinery now “fallen silent” – “fallen” – the might of the empire now “fallen” but now so long ago that it’s settled like dust. In fact it IS dust, and I think every day as I
Statues, Stones, Flowers, Mother
Statues come from a mineral material we call marble, porphyry, limestone, rock, rocks, stone, stones, gravel, pebble, sand. It’s undignified to call statues rocks, but they are, shaped rocks. Michelangelo looks almost cliché today, Prisoners the brilliant idea of a first-year student attempting to be “conceptual,” but really it was
Rich With History
It should come as no surprise that Rome is a dusty city. All those tumbling fragments, the withdrawal of the water after a flood leaving behind a silt-filled city, the centuries of statues chopped to powder to transform gods and fauns into lime for cement. And not just statues, but
Mummies, Madonnas
Mummies, Madonnas, Mothers, and other Parties, some of the injured, maybe injurious, splendid and humble, fragile and protective, or under pressure, holding or seeking to be held. I have spent all this time meditating on the injury that is anthropomorphism, an injustice to the stones themselves (and sometimes leaves, and all