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 Michelangelo who gave that student the idea and the permission to be conceptual when he did Prisoners, an idea so radically radical for its time that ——.   Radical in that it reminds us of the humble material origins of the Statue – it’s a rock, Jack – and of the presence of the artist, normally and normatively invisible at that time – here I am with my hammer and chisel, sweaty, covered with the dust of what I’ve decided is not-Statue – and of the process of wresting or wrestling or (choose adjective) aggressively persuading forcing, removing, or, as M would have it, liberating the Statue from the Stone. M might say, “the figure.” M might say, Liberating the figure that was already inside, trapped and waiting, masked in stone. Surely if we could hear them they’d be coughing and wiping their eyes, like miners, although they are the opposite of miners, they are the mined. And thus the identification and mixture, mix-up[1], between miner and mined, parent and child, Michelangelo and the Prisoners.

The Prisoners are both, coming and going. They remind us too that while they are busy being born they are also busy dying, like Dylan says. Imagine for a moment that they are statues that are now being sucked back into the rock as they crumble a bit. Recidivist prisoners, or maybe just formerly free (alive and well and not worrying about a thing) realizing that their period of liberty, of dancing and drinking, is over, and they are shuffling back into the mortal coil from which they came, womb or death as you like, non-being, non-drinking-and-dancing.

Is it in the same way that certain flowers are gory and exciting in the freshness of opening up, or is it folding in? Are they wrinkling or unwrinkling? Is that the color of dawn or of vegetal rust? (Francis Bacon and Chaim Soutine knew.)

In the same way that certain faces are ancient and infant at the same time in their pure astonishment. A few days before my mother died, she emerged from a sort of unconsciousness, opened her eyes, and looked at me with total amazement and joy. I stood still, surrendering myself to her eyes, which “ate me up” and “drank me in” both like it was the first time and as if she would have to take these images into eternity with her. And in fact for me it was the first time to watch my mother gaze upon me for the first time after I’d first emerged. But was it she who’d just emerged from some darkness into which Mr D, you know who, that guy or animal perched on a stool in the corner, invisible but emitting a strong smell, was leading her, just for a moment to look on me, before taking her back –-

She opened her eyes to see me afresh after all the years of difficulty and distance, eyes very wide and astonished, with all distance closed (John Berger: “Love aims to close all distance”) – it became clear that all that time the distance was a rope of longing.

[1] Implying not only ambiguity but also confusion, which is not bad