The earth’s silence became more important after the human clamor had arrived. It had to be walked to, listened to, and meditated upon like a god. The story of marble, which was a story of the violation and the worship of this entity, earth, seemed more and more to represent the search for a greater — possibly a profane — intimacy with it, a desire to be subsumed into its immortality that was also the desire to possess it. The results of this quest were preserved by the Athens museums in numerous cavernous galleries. These forms and faces of antiquity, in their incredible abundance, were a statement about man’s desire to make his mark. It is not to immortalize marble; it is to show an ambiguous need to submit to this god while also trying to gain control over it. The earth is our only authority.
Is it true, that the act or representation is also by necessity a act of destruction because it is inseparable with human autonomy? The simple process of perception is what allows a human to see. Writing was not something I considered destructive, but I did consider it useful, helpful, and even a form of path-finding. Yet, these tracks I left all over the place were an invitation to some future blight. Landscapes had become roads, roundabouts, and motorways by the time I was older.
In the neglected garden I sat and read about works of fascist architecture: the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest that is made from over a million cubic meters of marble; the Foro Italico in Rome, where football fans still come and go beneath Mussolini’s marble porticoes, past his mock-classical statues of athletes and the giant marble obelisk he erected in honor of himself. The Palace of the Parliament sinks six millimeters each year. It was built by enforced labor, involved the displacement of 40,000 of the city’s citizens, and a large proportion of its thousand-plus rooms were never completed. One could say that the artist is often weaker that the things he creates, but the dictator struggles to make something that will last him. The survival of these buildings seemed to reflect the moral problem of marble. I read about an Athens artist who creates marble sculptures from sagging bin bags, cardboard boxes, and piles of rubbish.
As we sat on the terrace of a hillside restaurant, a strange sunset began to unfold in front of our eyes. The sky turned almost green, became bilious, swollen, then there were a series or convulsions. Finally, a flood of phantom-like shapes began to appear from the horizon. It was as if the sun had burst. The sky seemed like a mad creature that had escaped: It appeared to rush towards us, to lift the sea from its bed and to devour distant islands until the entire bay was in a silent commotion, which suddenly escalated into an obscure form of ecstasy. It was disturbing to observe something so nakedly expressive and intimate, so unknowable. Despite the restaurant being crowded, even the waiters stopped their work and stood there staring.
We left theI was on an island for a few more days to travel to another island. There, I had been invited by a marble quarry with a long history. This second transition within the first shed a strange light on us and gave us anonymity. When my daughter was just a baby, I had the need to leave her for a few more days to go to America to give a talk. I still carry the scarlet marks of that painful journey. Every step I took from her in space and time was a transgression. It became almost unbearable for me to be alive during those days. But, there has never been an explanation or recognition of this torment. It was simply a result being a working mother. The agony was something nobody else could experience or understand. The motherhood cataclysms amount to so many footprints on the sand. They are a ghost that haunts the agreed upon structures of the real. History cannot be made of them.
On the journey to the second island, I recalled that long un-history in which every future moment seemed to be a threshold that offered the possibility of me stepping out of my ghost life and back into my life. But I never found the threshold. Instead, I lost myself in the dissimulations that motherhood wrought on me. It was impossible to establish an honest or legitimate relationship with reality. The choice to have children was purely personal. Concepts of justice were not possible. I was able to see how other women took every pleasure in their children and understood that this was their only reward. My scruples wouldn’t allow me to take such pleasure. My greatest satisfaction was in the idea that my children would be free from me, as I had never been. But perhaps it was merely that I had not sacrificed enough and that the work that took me away from my daughter — agonizing though it had been — was in fact a form of selfishness that disqualified me from the secret recompenses of motherhood.
The boat drove for hours across the bright water, sometimes passing other islands whose little white towns and villages scrambled neatly over the hillsides, and from that distance the breach between humans and the earth seemed lessened, seemed to arrive at a remote kind of harmony, or the illusion of it — it didn’t seem to matter which. The voidlike space of transition was there in the sea. With the links to land being loosened or suspended, it seemed to me like a place in itself. I knew that this feeling of lightness was also loss and that this nonplace could not be recovered. It was possible that an identity cost was incurred that made it unsafe to visit too often.
Source: NY Times