STONES

Well a stone after all is just a stone. And a stone may be worn by the elements- made smooth. Even a mountain may lose its edginess.

What is underneath a stone but more stone? Yet it is only the surface that is seen; seen according to our limited inscriptions. Here we locate the thing in a single moment of our choosing. Here on the surface is where we choose our version. Yet our inscriptions never penetrate to the essence. We never have the last word though we may forget what is said beyond our own breath.
Yet what rights have we to occupy in this manner. There is already so much that we must pass over so that things are never really there in their own right.

Stone of my stone I would break this tenuous obsession for that which is not there and catches itself in the very things that do exist so denying them of their true existence. For is it not the same with flesh and blood as with stone? That we are weaving our antidotes for the past and the future out of mouths which flag as if from a passing wind but cannot truly accept the passing of time, No we never really allow the wind to take us with it.. This is why it battles us so.

So I want to do something to address the problem of the stones. That evening, dressed in black; carrying only a small torch and a battery operated scouring brush I made my way down to the cemetery. It was dark. I set to work, eradicating names and dates and words of remembrance.

I worked methodically and I worked hard passing from one stone to another. I didn’t know but it seemed to me that each stone seemed to come back down to rest and stand a little easier than before like a soldier whose rigid salute has been relaxed and whose face begins to breath again in its own right.
Now it was the sediment of the thing itself built and compressed over time, rising from the interior to the surface that coloured and gave meaning to the expression of each stone. And the names of the dead rose into the air without, I think, recrimination. I stayed with the stones a very long time until day-break because they had much to tell me and these things were very strange. It was my first real conversation.

As the sun rose I left returning to my flat in Basingstoke where I slept until that evening, changed into my work clothes and made my way into the centre of the city. Then I entered the night-club where I worked. I was a cocktail waitress entertaining lonely men whose tongues spoke freely under the influence of alcohol and under my professional guidance they forgot the constraints that they had made their lives. Yet it was this very constraint that they never mentioned though it was that that had brought them there in the first place. I listened long into the night.