Fragments

By Jake Musich

∆

The hollow bones of the city laid open. Wisteria blistered beneath severe steel arbors. Helios

arced west to the sea with steady conscience as slow stalwart bells pealed in their tower, muddying

the pilgrim din below.

Repent. Repent. Repent.

∆

This studio is our tabula rasa. White page white sink white walls. And one cheap mirror

haloed with ink and paint. The old model bends and the charcoal bends with her. Sweeping arcs join

shoulder to thigh, hip to foot, in a pure unfettered dance. Olive skin clarifies firm muscles below.

She is verse rippling with sinew, flesh, and bone. Gestures fall like leaves. I pass the briar of her

womanhood; dark and furrowed like vineyard soil. The scalloped dimples of her back. Those proud,

enduring eyes. I have forgotten myself. I am her skin, the charcoal, and the mirror on the wall.

“Basta!”

I wash my hands in the sink. Black eddies down the drain. The model strides past, her

paisley gown alights behind her. She disappears into the courtyard. I kneel over the drawings on the

floor, a levy of marks and stains and streaks—a false mimicry. I cannot create her vitality. The

subtleties of the ribs, the strength of her neck, are represented but inertly. Drawn, but without life.

That night I see the old model on the street, clothed in the normalcy of the crowd. Her face

is old but smooth. We exchange smiles like secret confessions, but as we pass one another, I realize

I’ll never truly see her.

∆

Hips of stone rise before the sea—a beckoning corpse—one cloven peak that swells

patiently beneath a cloud of white silt. We ribbon skyward through a wound in the mountain,

passing bearded ascetics and cavalcades of men, their faces upturned to the dim blue. The leather

scent of their work lies low in shadowy gashes beside the road, the sun browning nose and brow and

earth as we bow and wobble over the cleaving heaps of stone.

A sign, Il Limite, stops us. We start on foot. Our path, a mess of rocks and grit, shifts

beneath us. The dull rumble of heavy machinery fills our footsteps. After an hour, a final

switchback brings into view a great cavern cut into the mountain. Smooth and rectilinear, the tunnel

extends in to utter blackness—I imagine the heart of the mountain, a great cold thing that beats

once in a human lifetime. I shudder despite the heat. Men and massive trucks pour out of the tunnel,

wet with cutting fluid, with drills, levers, and cutting wheels lurching behind them. Trucks pass us

laden with white flesh—the infamous marmo—the drivers steady despite the precipice beckoning on

either side of the narrow path. I'm an ant beside the trucks and mote of dust beside the mountain.

We climb further to the mouth of the tunnel.

Born to the woods and the open air, I do not venture under the mountain. Others do, but

I'm cowardly, I only stand at the portal and peer down the vast corridor. Figures approaching from

the other end, emptiness itself, grow from shadows into men. I meet gazes with a few, but their eyes

are as deep and unshaped as the void from which they emerged. They have the same face and

reticence as my father—I find myself thanking them as I turn to leave. Grazie mille.

A field of forgotten stone crowns the mouth of the mine. Jagged blocks of every shape and

color, many low and dejected sit beside the road; travertine reds nestle with sulfuric yellows, copper

greens, and every tint of white. Cappella dei Principi in the raw. A lost sexual rite, marble flesh left in

the sun.

I slip a leather throng under a piece of pure white stone, three by three, oblong and thick in

the middle with no obvious cracks. I drape it over my back, bending beneath its weight. Its rough

corners dig into me. The tether bites my shoulders with each footstep and a thin, bloody line opens

on my shirtfront. The path, now a wave of rolling stones, unsteadies me. My stone fights in final

protest. I'm stealing from the mountain (I'm stealing the mountain) and it's punishing me. But

Michelangelo and the Florentines built their city from the flesh of this very mountain! Am I unfit?

Unworthy? I've yet to try. My lungs are airless dust. “But,” I whisper more to myself than spirit of

the valley, “I will make something beautiful out of you.” The trucks and men wind past, their mute

thoughts echoing throughout the valley, my promise sealed but unsure.

∆

Night deepens, swaddling us in our secret pact. Bed sheets spread like vast oceans beneath

us holding the book aloft, the emblazed gold lettering of D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths sparkling in

the lamplight. My father’s baritone voice sags, exhausted and unused to reading aloud, the words

sliding and slipping from his mouth:

“The Danaids were the fifty daughters of Prince Danaus of Egypt, son of King Balus.

Despite his prosperity, Danaus fought relentlessly with his twin brother Prince Aegyptus, who had

fifty sons, over the right to the throne. But the claim was equally balanced and neither was able to

gain the upper hand. After many years and frustrations, Aegyptus threatened Danaus, demanding

that their children marry so that he may be king. Angry and frightened, Danaus fled with his

daughters to Greece, with his brother in hot chase.

After months, Danaus feigned a change of heart and agreed to the marriages. In secret, he

vowed retribution against his brother and armed his daughters with knives and demanded them, on

their shared wedding night, to murder their betrothed. Forty-nine obeyed, spilling their husbands'

blood and throwing their decapitated heads in a noxious marsh—but the fiftieth, Hypermnestra,

Greek for “greatly wooed,” spared her husband and fled.

The forty-nine other Danaids were sent to Tartarus, the dungeon of the Titans, to endure

the eternal task of filling a bottomless vessel. Penance: the water is purifying, forgiving respite. But

the vessel leaks fast and forever, the water always just out of reach; a torturous, futile despair that

lies beyond death.”

A photograph of Rodin's Danaid hung in my parents' room. The figure, luminous and tragic,

had fallen from the task before her. A water jug laid overturned beside her, the flowing liquid at

once her hair, the water, and the stone. I was gripped by the mystery of her face, tucked away

shame—was she beautiful? Monstrous? As I listened to my father and looked at the figure I, in truth,

felt mortal sorrow for the Danaids. I felt their blind trust dissolve into pain. I was desperate to right

the jug and whisper in her ear, "Get up. Get up."

So I resolved to carve her, in tribute to her endless task. I would sink my teeth into the stone

and eat away the shell concealing her. Form the pearls of her spine and the waves of her hair.

Perhaps I could help her, my own small way, find strength. Together we could wash sin from our

hands.

∆

I try to hold the quiet fury down. I still my hand around the grip, loose but steady. The uncut

stone sits on my workbench, stained with my scrawling measurements and estimations. I don’t swing

the hammer, I don’t need to; I only guide it as it falls. Lift. Drop. Chnkk. Lift. Drop. Chnkk.

Hammerheads are thick, heavy blocks of steel with polished faces—the oldest have been

compressed till the edges curl back like the beaten end of a wooden stake. There are many shapes

and weights, each suited to a different task, but mine is a hefty specimen meant to crack and rough

out large shapes. Paired with the point chisel, a slender column with single sharp end, the marble

opens and fractures. I close my eyes and visualize the Danaid, all of her, the supple flux of curve and

plane, inside the block.

She is within the stone, but this image does the carving process little justice. The form

doesn’t appear or demarcate itself. The well-known Michelangelo quote, 'I saw an angel in the

marble and carved until I set her free,' neglects a vital principle: how he carved the damn thing. Old

masters like Michelangelo and Bernini didn't visualize the figure in the center of the block. Marble is a

natural material, riddled with unseen fault lines, calcium deposits, and air pockets. If you carve from

all four sides, whittling away for weeks, months on end, you may discover a hidden defect and lose

an arm, a leg, or the entire form. You cannot waste time or stone. So, you don’t cut too deeply.

Begin the form close to the surface, as if you were draining a tub, letting the form emerge from the

surface as the water recedes. And as you work in from two planes, clarifying shape and proportion

from different angles, you can press further behind if you discover an obstacle. That's how the old

masters worked: slowly and tactfully, anticipating nature’s flaws.

I start gently, following my marks, aligning the hammer and chisel clumsily at first but

growing more confident with each strike. The thoughtful pause between hammer strikes is the

substance of creation—the fertile ground of decision and action. But the act is final and irrevocable.

Marble is not plastic like clay or wax; once acted upon it’s changed forever. But the hammer falls

anyway, chips fly, the chisel seeking the edges of her. I will find her.

Furious rhythm grows as I work, as if the hammer, chisel, and I are singing a primitive

melody—a laborious Gregorian chant or tribal drumbeat. It harmonizes with the deep pulse of the

earth; it is the pulse. The ringing of steel on steel fills my hands and arms and ears. The lines fall

away, time falls away, I fall away.

∆

White flesh cracks under my hands. The hammer is unconscious breath, blow after blow.

The legato ritual empties me. The hammer is ceaseless. My back is sturdy. The midday heat covers

me with sweat. The unending hammer, the unyielding chisel. The figure suffers within the stone. I

will free you. San Lorenzo sings.

Chnkk.

Chnkk.

A marble city. Marble men, women, warriors, priests, kings, boars, stags, chariots, trees, roses, and

palaces. The marble dead sleep on their cenotaphs. Eyes frozen in dreamless sleep. This pale stone,

born in the sea and purified by the earth, is Italian memory. Bitter, it tastes of countless years and

countless deaths. Omnipotent like the duende, it mocks us foolish enough to think we can tame it.

To be certain, we will become it. Imagine, a thousand civilizations, beliefs, and races forged into

stone. A patient reliquary of mankind.

Yet, it crumbles so easily beneath my hands.

∆

I have begun to lose myself. My name, that timorous note, has been swallowed up in cheap

Chianti and the late February mist. I work every day, carving or drawing till the sun begins to set,

and then I walk to the river and watch the final scales of light wash away. I spend nights with

friends, drinking and singing in the narrow streets. But each morning mirrors the last with such

clarity that I've begun to reorder the books on my nightstand before I go to sleep, lest I try to live

out a dream I didn't know I was dreaming.

I should clarify: I only began dreaming recently. Or dreaming real dreams, that is. Years of

drugs had cheapened them to muddied fragments; fractured narratives, vague faces, and tempests of

unset emotions awaited me each morning. But, now removed from the comforts of habit, the fog

has begun to clear. The dreams come slowly, reconstituting themselves like the golem, a creature

made of the Arno mud. Early one February morning, I wake from within a lost childhood memory;

my father had wrestled me out of bed in the middle of the night and carried me outside on his

shoulders. He worked so often I rarely got to see his face; only a pallor showed his long, selfless

exhaustion. But now I was his sentinel, alive, awake, and chosen, braced against his unshakeable

back—an axis mundi stretching deep into the belly of the earth. I held this truth in my belly, in the

fierce foolishness of childhood. Outside, beneath the moon, a silent ballet of fireflies danced. We

said nothing, only smiled at the whirling neon cloud.

I wake with that cloud bright in my mind, as though I'd been shaken out of the very moment

itself. The sheets are slick. Slowly the cracked plaster ceiling and Pier Paolo Pasolini's angular face

tighten and are made real. I search but cannot find my name; though the touch of my father’s

shoulders remains. And guilt. The acrid guilt of forgetting.

What have I become that I’ve forgotten these moments? I’ve modeled myself as an artist,

working and working, always sharpening my creative faculties—but at what risk? I’ve come the

mecca of the old masters—the preservers of memory—and yet I cannot keep hold of my past and

myself. It’s as though my story is shifting beneath my feet, losing shape and solidity as I give it to

this stone, this city. I worry that this fog will lift and reveal someone I don’t know, or didn't wish to

become.

∆

The road, Via del Monte alle Croci, the fringe of old Florence, is lined with small bistros and

flower shops. Locals eye stray tourists over espressos. Corner and cobblestone fall behind me. As

the city fades, San Miniato al Monte appears high on the bluff above like quiet, white-faced Panoptes;

warden of all he sees.

The smells and sounds of the city disappear as I pass beneath the old wall, the road

narrowing into a cobbled path that coils past private gardens and olive tree groves. The fragrant

shade is a blessing; the path is long and steep. The church meditates just above the battlements

beyond.

I reach the central courtyard as the sun begins to set, empty save an old caretaker and his

pail, a sea of gravel that breaks on the church shoal. The city stretches out into miles of haze behind

me, an ancient lakebed dried up like the pate of a skull. I nod to the old man, pressed by an eerie

familiarity, but his cap shades his eyes and I pass as though I hadn’t. The church is beautiful. A rare,

natural beauty, as though it'd always been here, and we had simply moved in and given it a name. Its

façade, the green and white marble inlay of Tuscany, is a duet of stained glass and sea-foam

geometry. High walls flank the church on either side and I walk alongside them, running my fingers

through the grasses and jasmine flowers growing from the crumbling brick.

At last, a pair of thick wooden doors, inscribed with a prayer for the dead:

Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine,

et lux perpétua lúceat eis.

Requiéscant in pace.

I push hard and I find myself on the edge of a marble wood; thousands of puckered busts

and crosses all black with soot. It twists and winds out of view, a wilderness of crypts, cenotaphs,

and cypresses. Flowers, in the varied palette of decay, dot the headstones. The crunch of the gravel

barely masks the hallowed silence. But I feel oddly alive here, and solipsistic breath fills me as I

wander past row after row: Papino, Strozi, Villari, Lorenzino, and Appietto. I squint at the epitaphs,

rubbing charcoal over those most fascinating, filling a notebook with forgotten names. Forgotten

lives.

I sit and draw in the shade of a massive stooping angel, her frozen arms cradling a limp man.

He faces the sky, but hers, looking down at him with an otherworldly pity, is perfect and alive. I'm

taken by their tenderness, by the truth in their limbs and eyes. The stone no longer seems stone, but

bright taut skin, carved by human hands but animated by something more. Trying to shake off the

unheimlich, the uncanny, I look closer to find the faint remains of a toothed chisel, slender ridges left

by the artist’s hands, mortal hands. My eyes soften and I stretch my hand to touch her cheek, but

jerk it back quickly. The stone is warm. The sun has just set.

A chuckle escapes my lips. My only companions in this sea of death are made of stone. The

glorious, tragic dream of art. I am here, for all my sins, alone in the dark with monuments, remains,

and memory. Strange, this holy ground. A space relegated to memory and populated by the dead.

How does it serve us? Staring up, why does this angel swoon so fiercely? When name and memory

fade completely, when the man beneath is dirt and dust, what is this marble thing worth? A beautiful

face and a whisper of shade? It makes me think of my own block, sidling unfinished in its haunt.

Cazzo, che faccio? What is this resolution, the frail potentiality of my art? The stone sings its

tireless dirge but I have no tears to give. Only sweat and fury and confusion. Fury. Where does this

appetite begin? I suppose I, like all people, strive for knowledge. Look to these hands and these

senses and know they endure to grasp understanding; always aching for the unknown and

unknowable. Desire, the glacial furor poeticus of mortality, is both cradle and grave. But how can I, this

fragile body that appropriates the “I,” effect change in the world? Art-making alone? I carve the

stone, but for whom? What is the purpose of this marble, the value; some glorified praxis or a mark

of my existence? I'll rot back into the earth, and it'll follow. The artist is a leaky vessel, hoping the

drops mean something. I want to make something real, honest, and personal. Imbue it with the

duende. Pull existence, in all of its fleeting realness, from the stone. Pull life from the reliquary of

life. Carve men from dead men. Flesh from flesh.

The city glows below, vast and alive. Wine is flowing and laughter pierces the wild ink of

night. The graveyard, the gate, the church, the path, the road. I have no real name, only these hands

and these eyes. I must believe in what's in front of me. But what can I prove? I’m a fallible mind that

occupies a fragile body. Nature is much too big to be grasped, let alone understood. But I must

make my own way, carve my own values from this strange existence. I am just a man, just flesh that

is yet to be stone.

∆

The studio floor is harder and colder tonight. Ringed with rasps, flat chisels, and dust, I sit in

a pentangle of finishing tools like a crude magician. Smoke wallows like incense. My fingers ache and

my back is tight but the work is not done. The Danaid looks down on me with mournful incomplete

eyes, her sallow latticework skin reflecting my lamp. She is waiting. Yearning. Countless hours have

become the crease of an elbow, a collarbone, and an eyelid; but stone still holds her. My pace has

slowed. Each strike is less fierce, less certain.

San Lorenzo sings the day’s last song. Repent, it says.

Long sleep beckons. The long way down, where dreams dwell. I try to press it back, drawing

the smoke deep. My head spins. These days I dream only of her, of those unfinished eyes and the

overflowing jug. Each night her slender lips become real and opens, she whispers, “You’ve tried.

Go, this is my burden.” I try to speak, but my mouth is a spring of brackish water. The more I try—

if only to utter an iron “no”—the more she drowns.

I gather a handful of dust and let it fall between my fingers. It spreads and settles on the

tiles. Part of me wants to shave her down to a fine snowy powder, carry her to the sea in my pocket

and wade in till the water covers us. We could sleep there on the ocean floor till we become the

mountain once more. Maybe, a thousand years from now, a son or daughter might come along and

purify us, acquit me. No, no I must burn myself on this pyre of art and leave fertile ash behind.

Youth who undertake this journey will need pain and memory as nourishment and footprints in dust

to know the path.

∆

Piazza della Signoria is an orgiastic ritual, a temple of the Eye—a world apart from my solitary

studio. Cameras flash. Men and women thrust and gasp. Children duck and scream. Gods, heroes,

and maidens flex and agonize on their plinths. A Sabine women spirals in a final cry as Roman

hands squeeze and hold her. Light cut from the Uffizi's high arches drips with shadow. Clowns and

street performers cry and wheel, teasing cute women with feathers and paint. Gypsies kneel on all

fours before the crowd, forehead to cobblestone, in false penance.

My pencil slithers across the page. I’m the crowd’s scribe, a transient mirror that exists to see

and not be seen. I sketch feverishly. The pencil rises and falls, more hand than tool, trying to capture

the little girl chasing pigeons, the elderly couple in the shade, the jaded museum guard. The drawings

feel like ghostly charcoal daguerreotypes in my hands.

A young boy appears behind me. I look up, surprised. He points with a stubby finger, in that

coy boyish way, to the pencil. I lay it in his hand—it's much larger there in his tiny palm.

“Vai. Disengi qualcosa. Disengi tutto. ”

He smiles and dashes back into the crowd. I watch his shoes disappear into the human

underbrush, leaving nothing in his wake, and smile.

The future may lie in those small hands.

∆

If you look east before dusk, you can almost see the river rising from the sandstone slopes of

Monte Falterona. It flows from the high vertebrae of the Apennines down into Tuscany, gathering

tributaries and strength as it moves; fertile, life-giving force.

But here, at the narrowest shore, the Arno is a tame band of green water, a serpent ribbed by

bridges. Bright laughter fills the banks and jetties; skiffs pierce the current; the city sparkles. The

river trudges on unawares like a shimmering smudge, lapping and folding on the stone piers,

burrowing ever deeper into the valley. The current is patient, resolute, a pilgrim on the path.

I am still, despite it all. Quiet inside. Far away, and yet near at hand, rosy light floods the

cypresses and the gnarled olive trees squatting on the hillsides and burns the churches’ golden

domes. In a mere moment, the last shards disappear behind the hills. The city darkens. The river

exhales its endless breath, a sound that fills and carries me into the night. I head for the sea, buoyed

by silt and dreams.

∆