The David

The question is whether or not the David should go. I suppose that the word go is potentially misleading. Of course, most human beings know that a large portion of our life is lived out under obscured meaning. The word that more appropriately connotes my question is destroyed, though I’d be forced to include the word be in order to form a proper grammatical construction. Grammar, as we also know, is a product of this particular day and age, like beauty, variant spellings, or which side of the road a car should be driven on. We have so many laws and ideas, which are really only conventions, language chief among these that we’ll have to forego much further discussion on the matter in order for this particular story go anywhere and not just end up as a long preamble to nothing, though I’d probably call it an enquiry into subjectivity. The mere fact that the enquiry is being made in English already dooms the project to failure, though failure is precisely what the project would be after. Let us leave these things temporarily. The shadow of the doorway has moved fifteen degrees since I started talking and a piece of ivy has started curling around the brass hinge. These are the sorts of facts that I feel more comfortable reporting.

A cat came by yesterday and sat in the window sill, licking its paws, slowly, carefully, as if it was the most important task in the world. What does a cat licking its paws consider to be the most important thing in the world? Its paw? Cleanlieness? Does the cat licking its window sill even exist? Upon further consideration, I think not. I think I am remembering a cat that once licked its paws on a different window sill, sitting in a bar of shadows created by the pane. The cat is only in the window sill of my mind, which makes me wonder whether either cat can be said to have existed at all? What happens to beings when the memory is extinct? Perhaps that is when a soul truly perishes. Perhaps heaven is populated with famous people and that was the reward of fame? It seems a silly theory, but I’ve no doubt that I’ll come up with a preponderance of silly theories from here on out. And, as no one is around to dissuade me, or generate any other theories for that matter, perhaps my theory of the afterlife is the one that will be memorialized.

There is a sculpture of a man, or a sculpture of a rock. It’s really impossible to tell, to be honest. They are labeled prisoners, half-formed arms with extended triceps, the adductor muscles of a partial stomach. And here is a sign that is telling me that they are prisoners. And yet, without the sign perhaps I would not see them as prisoners but as malformed rocks, less prisoners than the violated. It is, as you know, man’s need to anthropomorphize that makes Michelangelo’s statues prisoners. One could ask, though it’s not particularly interesting, if a stone would prefer to remain a stone or be made into a sculpture? It’s immaterial, yes? I’m changing the titles on the sculptures to “failed attempt at art” in order to more accurately depict them. I was tricked into seeing them as prisoners until I’d been in here for a week or so, when it became clear that no one else was coming back, and I had to begin thinking on my own.

And that’s why I’m wondering if I should destroy the David? Here. Alone. Marooned on the planet like we’re all marooned in our own heads, though, I’m no longer concerned with my understanding of solipsism. The whole point now being made moot, it seems. I suppose I can’t guarantee that no one else is alive. If they are, I haven’t seen them, and so, rationally it’s up to me to make decisions about things in order to stay sane. Though I suppose it is now also at my discretion to define a thing like sanity.