Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Spencer Diver

It is a difficult thing to describe to you my state of non-being, just as it is difficult for me to describe the distinct point at which my non-being was overturned. I’m sure it is a similar predicament that you face, but mine has the difficulty of being decentralised. For it would be inaccurate to say I was born of one mind, hosted by a single definite being of vision and discrimination. It could have been the first moment a worker approached an unfurnished hill, the first slab of concrete poured onto the ground, the first beam welded into place, perhaps the last agonised revision on a tattered piece of graph paper. 

But if you’ll indulge me in a bit of vulgar mytho-poetics, I would like to think my existence transcends a simple artistic materiality. I am but one manifestation of a larger essence, a hypostatic union between form and concept that emerged long before lead was set to paper. The first time a man noticed the harsher setting of the eyebrows of his peers, I was there. When this difference overcame his being, crystallising into a hard structure of glass, reflecting back every worst image of himself, I watched on. And when that structure surrounded him so completely that he set out to smash the thing with stone, or with a club, or with his own hand— in turn setting that tool to flesh— I witnessed it all. Such was the nature of my conception. 

Thus, I was placed on a hill, looking up to a great mountain. I’ve always questioned this positioning. What purpose was I meant to derive from being so close to the sublime when what I am built to symbolise is so contrary to it? Is it an aspiration? A call to resistance? A deeply insensitive irony? Occasionally, I imagine my concrete foundation spilling out onto the slopes of the hill below, hardening and slowly pushing me up until I reach the peak of the mountain. It was impossible to imagine what I would do once I reached it, but the dream gave me spirit. When the workers finally put down their hand tools and drove away their massive earthmovers, the tentative feet approached me, walking up the solitary paved path and stopping to admire the freshly-planted garden. After a few years, I began to feel the footsteps and recognize them. The ordered, brisk footsteps of a newcomer, the deliberate and heavy steps of a geriatric, the patters of a running child. 

As time went on, I received less visitors, but this never struck me as a concern. To seek me out is very much intentional— I am secluded from humanity. Though also excluded from nature. Light reflected from my stainless steel beams dance in rainbow splotches on the leaves of the foliage around me. Very little to me is familiar, almost everything is alien. Though there was one who I got to know well. He was either very old or badly injured, as each step he took was long and laboured. Often he needed to rest on me for a while before moving again. How he managed to reach me so consistently was beyond belief, and yet his lumbering steps would always manage to appear. When workers stopped coming to water my garden, he brought bags of water bottles with him, splashing them onto the plants during the summer months. He would walk around me, stopping every once in a while before continuing on. He barely made noise other than the sound of his feet, though one morning I heard him weeping faintly while resting beside the garden. After that day, he too stopped coming, and I was left alone. 

I began to hear new rumblings— this time not the intimate sound of footsteps, but the distant thumping of artillery. When the footsteps returned, they were different. Frantic, with the rattling of rifles. The new men used me as a hideout, drilling satellites and military equipment into my flesh and hiding munitions inside me. I wanted to purge them from the hill, again imagining the concrete foundation spilling out, but this time encasing the men and flooding them out, hardening into a thick seal around me, keeping me from the outside world. But I was impotent. 

They left, unceremoniously ripping their equipment from my body and loading them onto giant trucks. I was alone again. My garden was long dead, dried up and trodden upon. My path was cracked, and my flesh was punctured, ripped, and rusted. Some young people would come up to the hill to find me, ripping off my panels and running off to sell them. Others would climb me, made much easier now that my organs of girders and bricks were exposed. They would spray paint things on my walls, some crude, some hopeful, most desperate. One visitor wrote “FIX ME” in big red letters. Whether it was addressed to me or the writer, I’m still unsure of. Regardless, no one answered this plea, just like the others scrawled on me. Any visitors that weren’t coming to write on me or steal from me instead photographed my ruined body. I am no longer a witness to cruelty, but a site of cruelty to be witnessed. Perhaps this was an eventuality. For what was my purpose in memorialising cruelty if not to reify it, bring it into form as a being of rusted steel and raw concrete? 

My beams have begun to sag, the rust slowly eroding my body until I crumple into a twisted mass, an ex-signifier. I ache for this day. I imagine myself slowly melting into the hill, grass growing up through my mangled steel frame and lifting the hill ever so slightly higher. Then, maybe, the workers will arrive again and make a new me, taller and gleaming, holding the same promise that I held, holding the lie together for as long as possible before the rust comes again.