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 objects), to understand – not their subjectivity, since, possibly, probably, that idea itself is anthropomorphizing –

But to understand that they are not “in my world,” but that we are both in the same world, and that I can understand their form, color, weight, and so on, and also deduce some of their history, especially if I pay attention to science, but that’s about it. I appreciate them with my instruments and I try to stop right there. But I’m acknowledging, now, that it’s impossible. I’m not painting smiley faces on them, but it’s still impossible. (And in a moment of weakness I painted some of them gold. Was that wrong? Did I suffocate them like Goldfinger? Is even that though anthropomorphism? It is.) Now I understand this truth without surrendering to it. I struggle without success, that’s how it is. I admit that I understand them on my terms, even as I try to understand their terms, i.e. the pressure, the liquidity, the time – overall the time is what I’ll never grasp – that made them what they are today – briefly for me, for a long time for them, and to know they’re changing imperceptibly (to me, with my fast eyes) every day, as I am, but much faster, so that one day I look in the mirror and say, “Shit, what’s that?” But I never look at a stone and say Shit What’s That. Only stones can do that with themselves and each other, because only stones run on so slowly through eternity. (Here I must insert a gag: I imagine stones, looking in stony mirrors and saying, “Shit, what’s that?”)

But they are of – no, they are the recipients of and the cause of – tremendous feeling for me, of the pathos that is mine, because of death. I am vulnerable in their confronto, like that Matisse painting of the boy with the half-blinded, injured face, at the piano, because he’s waiting for his mother, who’s just an idea, out the window.