because all this mess grief makes, it makes with love.
there are particular places things go when they are taken from us— the tip of our tongue and the back of our mind— where storage is easy, but retrieval is hard.
dear little voice,
that winter when life was very hard and love seemed hopeless and i was generally dismayed with my lot, i seemed only to be able to smile at the thought of michelangelo.
the story of Italian marble is the story of relentless motion. it is a story etched in the violence of the earth itself and shadowed by failure; echoed by crushed dreams, crushed fingers, crushed men. never in the history of the world has there been such tireless effort devoted to wrenching and carrying so far from its source a material so very inclined to stay put where it is. every inch of its journey is one wrestled clumsily from inertia, and speaks to a cost—a price paid in the currency of human pursuit, human ambition, human mistakes. here is a material, battered by the physical tolls of human failure, inherently resistant to displacement, and yet subjected to a persistent upheaval, torn from its home, and compelled across distances it was never meant to travel.
“there is no avoiding the tyranny of its weight,” as the art historian William E. Wallace wrote.
but it is also the story of greatness: of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne; the impossibly delicate implosions of its infinite leaves. of Caveno’s Psyche and Cupid; its silken, downy breath somehow rendered permanent in stone. of Michelangelo’s perfect, 17,000 pound statue of the biblical David.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo e Daphne from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 1622-25, Galleria Borghese, Roma
what we believe we are seeing when we glimpse the marble thigh of the Madonna or the downy fold of a Cupid’s wing is a complete myth— but all of these sculpture are only their endings; only the closing words to long and wonderful stories that travelled from mountains to piazzas, beginning far before any of their artists’ births and involving both the primitive, sweltering groans of strained men and the technical dexterity of carts, moats, and ox.
yes— our mouths droop before the taut neck of the Cupid, falling through love like a sky in flowers— but the tyranny of its material’s weight was in effect long before it moved us.
Pietà, (1498–1499) Michelangelo Buonarroti
Michelangelo supposedly walked through the streets of Florence each day, beneath the soft Blue of Sky, past the mirrors of water that move from rivers to fountains, through the marble of piazzas and serenity of open terraces, gardens, and sunsets, speaking in myth and in memory, carrying a slab of uncut marble on his back, and telling anybody who asked, in the calmest and most unwavering of voices:
‘there is an angel inside here screaming to get out.’
but the slab that would become the David was cut out of the mountains 11 years before michelangelo himself was born, did not suggest an angel in stature nor beauty, and began with loss. in fact, it began with several losses. it began with so many losses, and such serious ones, that the entire ambition of the project began to feel impossible from the very moment of its inception.
italian marble is made in the heart of Carrara's quarries, where time seems to slow to a ripening pace and almond trees blossom at the length of dreams; where marble gleams in the sun and the sea breaks into waves over distance hillocks.
the people of Carrara have come to intimately understand this strange language of marble; a dark dialect of patience, time, and ancient craft. Agostino di Duccio and his soldiers, chosen by Florence to find and transport the ideal slab of marble to create what would eventually become the David, did not. theirs was a language carved in the sweat of ambition, and they found themselves unfluent in the patience demanded by the quarries.
their final selection was a colossal, imperfect stone that betrayed the ideal of marble's inherent perfection. this piece, chosen for its size but marred by imperfections, would soon come to embody a struggle against nature, expectation, and the very limits of human ambition. let us rise a little higher, we hear them chanting, still, through the hills of Carrara: let us go a little further.
the journey from the quarries to Florence was an odyssey marked by months of laborious descent and a two-year trek fraught with natural adversities. the block's arrival in Florence was a spectacle, its imperfections overshadowed by its magnitude— yet, upon closer inspection, the city’s leaders found a stone compromised not only in its selection but in its initial carving by Agostino, further narrowing the already slim chances of its transformation into what they hoped would be the perfect David. disappointment settled over Florence, and the block— now an embarrassing manifestation of human error — was tucked away in a piazza square, untouched and unmoved, accumulating dust, debris, and pigeon foul. slowly, this symbol of loss carved itself into the architecture of the city— an unrelenting reminder of failure that, through changing times, was referred to half in respect and half in jest as "the Giant,” by disillusioned locals.
but what others saw as an accumulation of mistakes and loss in a single block of flawed and combusted stone, Michelangelo regarded as containing all of the possible conceptions for a work of Art.
in other words, he saw an angel.
Detail : The Wounded Achilles. 1842, Innocenzo Fraccaroli.
Italian 1805-1888. marble. Villa Reale. Milan.
i confess i want to be so much more like michelangelo.
i do not want to know how to love beginnings except by loving endings; how to love my creations for the losses that inevitably provoke them; how to love my angels for their slabs of stone.
i confess i do not always excel in this relentless ambition.
beginnings are, of course, always a case for joy— they tirelessly reveal endless notions of what we are capable of and of what is available to us in kaleidoscopic refractions of bliss and incandescence— of limitless possibility.
and whilst we are creatures who excel at beginnings and delight in the middle of things, it is in the midst of endings that we so often flounder.
but the trouble with this, of course, is clear: once anything begins, there can only be an infinite array of endings. once anything is given, there can only be infinite loss.
and loss is painful; our mistakes and our regrets for them even more-so. but one corollary to this is thus: both in the sense of our own hearts and that of michelangelo’s hands, every loss reveals what we are made of:
“the sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work.” Michelangelo wrote, “it is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
The worn marble steps at the Leaning Tower of Pisa— the result of 500 years of walking.
we so often conflate loss with the final walk through that terrifying door: with death; with our final parting from those we love. but loss is not only death: it as much departure, change, separation, release, and progression— not only from others, but from our dreams, our expectations, our illusions, our attachments.
loss is an excellent teacher on the value of loss— and it wastes no time with its claustrophobic expedience, its ruthless practicality, its gloomy prudence and in-advance charisma— knowing you’ll leave very soon, and it simply doesn’t have any time to waste.
life is hard, little voice. who has told you that, recently? who has given you that gloomy glimmer of permission? life broadens, its days widen, and we feel smaller in comparison. and we mistake the new contours of our forms with the ghosts of what has left, instead of a new shape on its way, slowly, to reveal itself to us.
life gives everything and then charges double by taking it back. it’s not the bargain you thought you were getting with your nose pressed to the window, waiting in line.
we are permitted, yes, to visit the bodies of lovers, to move against them in sleep so we feel less alone— even for an evening. we are allowed the romantic life with its bliss-in-the-mouth bounty and afternoon coffee, the daze of sheets and sun, we are permitted our childhoods in their haze of ripe fruit, cheerful discoveries and pancakes on sundays. we are allowed our mothers and their tangled yarn, garlic, and saffron. we are allowed our youth, the total ecstasy of its uneducated possibility, of little hotel rooms and the visions of who we one day believe we will be.
and it is right to mourn the perfect bodies, the oyster shells, our bodies looking down at the venice canal, the uninterrupted words, our ambitions for them, the obscure holiness of only two dollars in the pocket, the boys on motorbikes and the wonderful blaze of our totally uneducated aspirations toward utter and absolute perfection.
because all this mess grief makes, it makes with love. and love may be small, but the world is smaller— and us even more-so.
there are particular places things go when they are taken from us— the tip of the tongue and the backs of our minds— small, translucent colonies of memory like the edges of a bridge, like perfume lingering in a room, like the last spot you remember seeing your keys. one of them is in memory— that city of ghosts where storage is easy, but retrieval is hard.
The Abyss. 1909. Pietro Canonica. Italian 1869-1959. marble.
all of this is inexplicable to anybody but us. we flounder when we try to explain it. we feel alone and, quite often, unnecessarily stupid. we feel this way because we need the memory to remember us also. but the memory cannot speak: it is both more stale and more sensitive than we are. it knows it will not come back. we, for all our worldly cleverness, still hold fast to the dream that it will. we feel, in short, imperfect for its absence.
with every loss, we surrender a piece of ourselves—tender, vibrant, soft and alive—to be supplanted by a clearer shape. each subsequent departure operates as a sculptor's tool, methodically carving away at what remains of us. it is a process at times barely noticeable, at times excruciating, and at times marred by missteps and humiliation, that lays bare a new shape.
this sculpting process, so relentless and so often unyielding, does not stop with just one form. as we meet with more beginnings, we welcome more endings, and the chisel continues its important work— sometimes even uncovering flaws within the marble, mistakes in the sculpting that speak to our vulnerabilities, our errors, our blunders, our regrets. but with each subtraction there is a revelation of something both more intricate and more refined, smoothed and contracted by the sheer ongoingness of life.
as is always the case with accumulations of more life, more suffering, more ecstasy, more experience, and more grace, we form the contours of what we are, what we will be, and what we are capable of.
it is a painful process, and as such we have devised all sorts of ultimately unclever solutions for it. historically, one such solution has been to carefully calcify the heart’s tender membranes; to create a fortuitous mound between what we are now and what we have been. but it is far too late to unlove what is gone. instead, let’s pause a moment, run our hands over the contours of what has been left behind, cook something very slowly and eat it more slowly still, write down a word, whistle in the shower, go for a very long walk, and become acquainted with this stranger that is our new shape.
Pietà (1498-99) by Michelangelo
St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome
Marble beauty.
in that same winter where i was truly at war with my lot and all strung up and dizzy on love, i spoke with a sculptor in Florence.
the sculpting process is relentless, he remarked over olives and grappa, but what other choice do i have?
“what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote.
perhaps what is most terrifying about loss is not the thing itself walking out the door forever, but what it reveals to be the essential nature of our very vulnerable condition: the understanding that, no matter what, we are here all on our own. things leave, and these losses are as universal, as unavoidable, and as inexorable as any other condition of our lives.
but when we grow by losing. we grow by leaving. and we grow by letting go.
it is for this reason that at the first instance of any ache in my heart, i think always and immediately of michelangelo— who, when asked how he created the David, said that he did not sculpt David from the stone, but rather that he simply removed everything there that was not David.
looking at the David, i am reminded that i am not the first to be tasked so casually with the impossible: with being a real human being with real raptures and real disappointments, tasked with revealing an angel only by chiseling away at what is already there, and that which i believe to be necessary to my form.
when i think of michelangelo wandering the markets with uncut marble on his back, i don’t think of a madman; but i also don’t think of divine genius.
i think of an ordinary man tasked with ordinary ambition, whose material we all share— accumulations of mistakes, blunders, natural and unnatural disasters— intent not on transformation but rather revelation; for whom loss was a necessary corollary to revealing what has always been waiting: an angel crying to be released.
and i begin, slowly, to share something of his stature— that curious invulnerability, that lengthening of the spine, that tender, braced composure— for it coexists with hurt, all of this loss, with pain too— but also with a certain becoming.
Pluto and Prosperina, Borghese, Rome.
and so beneath the David i begin to think of the ancient greek word σκέπτομαι, or skeptomai— to search, to think about, to look for— which shares its roots, of course, with our modern word for skepticism.
this skeptomai does not contain what we have perhaps been trained to think is contained in the word— not dogmatic dismissal nor judgment— but rather is a complement toward its roots in Greek: a tenderness for experience, because experience is human. a tenderness toward life, because life is human— an availability to it that leaves us exposed to the mallet, yes— but also to the possibility of the revelation of what we are.
it is tempting to flounder in moments of loss. it is difficult to remember that perhaps what it being removed is simply everything that is not us.
Michelangelo regarded a single block of stone as containing all the possible conceptions for a work of art, and believed that the artist's task is sculpting the marble block to reveal the ideal form within.
but i look at The David and the word perfect no longer seems adequate. and it isn’t: there are, i have since learned, cracks within his ankles and legs— products of oppressive gravity—pocked holes in his face since filled in by restorers, a small chip of stone missing from his lower left eyelid, a right little toe that has gone missing no less than three times, and a scar on his left foot left by a passing stranger with a hammer in 1991.
and although the David’s flaws were mostly patched up over the centuries, if you look very carefully, you can still see all the scars.
and i saw them that day too— the day i was at war with my lot and standing beneath this incredible miracle. my eyes meet with his feet— the scar left by the severing of his little toe— and i felt the cracked scars and pocked holes in my own heart: quick as lightning, hot, whisper thin.
my David.
when creating David, the essential first step was standing the marble up. but this slab of stone had now lay dormant for over 35 years, untouched and accumulating the typical scars and scratches of neglect. quite simply, it had deteriorated beyond sculptability.
marble, you see, is best carved at when freshly cut from the mountain— the longer it sits dormant, the more brittle it becomes. but this here would become a fragment of one of the feats that would elevate Michelangelo to mythic status: that he not only salvaged the ruined block, but also turned it into a masterpiece.
as the Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari writes: “truly it was a miracle on the part of Michelangelo to restore to life a thing that was dead.”
when finally revealed, David stood not only as a statue, but as a symbol of reanimation, transmutation, and becoming.
Michelangelo went off to Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel and designed the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica— at the time the largest in the history of the world. he eventually died, famous beyond measure, at age 88. he would never see his David again.
Undine Rising from the Waters, Chauncey Ives
near the time of his death at 87, now unable to lug his heavy stone beneath the Blue and through the markets, he was remarked to have begun to mutter, over and over again: ancora imparo.
i am always learning.
there might come a day when this world is returned to itself and a solitary human being stands totally bereft of even an inclination of the sheer magnitude of love and loss once exerted upon the surface of the earth— in the meticulously arranged stones of Florence, nestled within the billow of French lavender groves, meandering the streets of Melbourne on bicycles. no trace will be left of palaces, nor of the quaint Parisian cafes that played host to the quiet camaraderie of Renoir and Cezanne, to the tense friendships of Van Gogh and Gauguin, of the moment that moved itself whisper thin through my Heart that rainy night in June. this is how we are undone: quietly and politely, not by the clamour of conflict, but by the inevitable advance of time. we have known this ever since we came into being and realised that we must die, that we must lose, that any beginning is only ever the predecessor of an ending.
but much like marble, i am learning that what matters most is not necessarily our eventual form when we walk through the terrifying door, but the fact that we were touched once and in some way at all— sometime, somewhere, in some place, in some way. when we grieve, we are saying that we know our body was touched, that we know our mind was touched, that that touch was so powerful that it still shifts in its skin inside of us, nosying its way out in memory, longing to do its remembering dance— more distant and more untouchable than fading stars.
dulcis ex aspirius, little voice.
through difficulty, sweetness.
love always, now, and forever,
ars poetica.
little voice: it is my belief that Poetry is a human birthright. it is for this reason that my work will always be completely free, but it takes considerable Time and Love to give to you each week. if it has brought you something, please consider buying me a book so that I may continue to tuck Words in your pocket:
PS- there is one more story i love, little voice, about michelangelo. would you like to hear it?
“John Updike once wrote that “excellence in the great things is built upon excellence in the small,” and the observation holds up ideally when we think about Michelangelo’s numerous great achievements — Pietà, David, The Last Judgment, St. Peter’s Basilica — in comparison to this humble yet striking rundown of ingredients for a meal, of the same basic kind each of us scrawl out regularly. But when Michelangelo scrawled, he scrawled with both a craftsman’s practical precision and an artist’s evocative flair. “Because the servant he was sending to market was illiterate,” writes the Oregonian‘s Steve Duin in a review of a Seattle Art Museum show, “Michelangelo illustrated the shopping lists — a herring, tortelli, two fennel soups, four anchovies and ‘a small quarter of a rough wine’ — with rushed (and all the more exquisite for it) caricatures in pen and ink.”
As we can see, the true Renaissance Man didn’t just pursue a variety of interests, but applied his mastery equally to tasks exceptional and mundane.
Which, of course, renders the mundane exceptional.”
- Colin Marshall
These words save lives.
How beautifully put to say that grief is evidence of being touched in some way, thank you.