A Stone's throw (away)

Stone never lies, it’s perhaps why man chose it as his storytelling medium. Before he ever wrote, he etched, in protest of his own transience, the ephemerality of the flesh. He was a sculptor before he was ever a writer. One can say that writing is lapidary, but etching isn’t literary. He had not coveted anything as much as he’d coveted stone, he lived in them, he prayed at them, he cooked his meat on them, he hurled them at his enemies, he had them placed at his place of burial. it was (supposedly) the first murder weapon, possibly the last. We owe much of our oft-used idioms to it, ‘hard’, ‘tough’, ‘tenacious, ‘Stubborn’, ‘timeless’, ‘steadfast’, are all formally attributable to this substance.

They empowered him yet they weighed him down, and when he wanted to transcend the present to foretell a future event, he carved silhouettes of that future out of them, such are August Schreitmuller’s virtue statues on the tower of Dresden, which he sculpted earlier in the century, long before the swarm of Anglo-American fireflies stripped the city down to its skeletons in that fateful Tuesday of February of 1945.

The city had been depopulated, flesh wasted, but once again (and ever), the stone, particularly the eloquent ones of Schreitmueller, endured. The statue named ‘Gute, a photograph of which taken by Richard Pete later that year titled Blick vom Rathausturm nach Süden (View from the town hall tower to the south) showing the Statue overlooking the marred edifice of the once belle of a city, became more monumental than the monument itself, for in reality both served a singular function.

But that image, and the angle from which it was captured threw special light on the war, or perhaps chipped into a hidden layer of it. With its striking pose, its open arms and its permanent glare, it appeared to protest the destruction, or perhaps, during the bombardment, melodiously conducting the thunderous orchestra, and that the pose we see is just the closing gesture. Or celebrating the revival of the city and the return of its people after the war. Or yet again protesting, decades later, the quickness with which its populace had forgotten that memory. In stone the minutiae of human drama acquire contextual significance, premonitions and promises interface in a silent-yet-eloquent gesture.

They are both embryonic and vestigial.