OF THE MORTALITY OF ALL ART

The artist who acknowledges her own mortality,

still believes, wants to believe, tries to believe

in the immortality of her art;

not all of it, of course -

but that some fragment of it, like a zircon

from the Hadean embedded in younger rock,

will be carried through all the coming years,

through aeons of human life and civilization

to endless future, immortal,

and in it, her own essence, a fragment,

a ghost of a thought still whispers

to those who walk on the soil she became.

But this is vanity, vanity and hope

that grows out of deeper understanding

that there is no hope, no immortality,

only extinction of body, mind and all

that it wrought; that all has an end

and once even the faintest echo of us

has ceased to spread throughout time and space.¨

You say: But look at the words of Enheduanna!

Read them!

Hear the Hurrian hymns,

voice the Tale of Sinuhe, see

the murals of Pompeii, exchange

glances with the dead in the Faiyum portraits;

be silent and in awe in Chauves and Lascaux!

But I answer: Enheduanna has spoken

for forty-three centuries; Sinuhe's poet
thirty-seven; the Hurrian hymns

are reaching our ears through thirty-four centuries,

the murals of Pompeii and the Fayum portraits

were made by hands turned to ash and dust of the desert

twenty centuries ago; the great shrines

of our ancestors at Lascaux and Chauves,

in the womb of the Earth, have

been there mere fifteenth and tenth of the life of our species.

What will remain of them in three-hundred-thousand years,

the age of our so wise race?

Stand before the abyss of time,

know that all that you are,

all that you create

are but pebbles thrown in the chasm.

Know that one day

a faint, faint sound will come

of the pebble hitting the bottom,

echoing, fading, dying.

02.04.2018