I don't know if y’all know anything about marble,
but it’s an unforgiving substance.
It’s like – it’s like – I don't know what it’s like.
But it’s been found out that even masters,
when they’re telling us what they’re doing,
don’t necessarily know. And so:
if it’s the artist's job to catch our attention,
tell us something, and send us on our way;
and if we’re studying nature, and nature is,
of course, always a naked woman;
and if the sleep of reason produces monsters;
and if you’ve been told, that your voice
is bad but no matter, for the world needs listeners, too;
and if you’ve been told, that holding hands
doesn’t work, because there are other people in the world;
and if you do not see America yet;
if you recognize me without seeing what I’m carrying;
if tables slope when you are sad;
if you talk a lot in class, in the wrong way;
if your own butler tried to order you around at the Frick;
if you live to maximize your time in the sun;
if you know about things because you’ve seen movies;
if you fall together into thought and contraposto;
if Mary is, for you, a heavenly significant character;
if the note-taking lights in this room form a halo around your head;
and if you are going to hell in the Mercedes Handbasket;
and if you are not afraid to be in there with the unwashed men;
and if you do not want to move on soon,
although you will have to, for the season is hounded
and hunted to extinction as I speak:
then you are a narrative;
you are the collected works;
you are the paradoxes and the mysteries
that the Catholic Church will canonize
as the sweet and detailed;
you are both my relief and my sculpture in the round;
you are the symbol that will allow me to draw what I cannot draw:
the rowdy health of youth, its fluting and its swaling.
[1] The text consists entirely of things uttered during Kristin Romberg's Art Hum class at Columbia in the fall of 2004.
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