The Time Sculptor (re-opened)

I was lonely. Sitting down with empty pads, writing what I assumed were ideas, sculpting the contours of something, which resembled the outline of a thought, abstract shapes and black lines of suppositions. I didn’t ask anyone if I was right or wrong. I didn’t care. I was so profoundly alone I made friends with books. I cancelled dream and hope. I lived in a domain some people liked to call nothingness, but it was mine. It was my web and I was spider.

I imagined an impossible space, a space-less circle, in which my mind wandered and I spoke to myself on the wings of a secret music.

I wondered if it was space at all. My main preoccupation was time or how to annul it. I was a negativity trying to negate another. It was unequal combat but I felt strong. My Nietzschean vocation wholly intact, I hoped by ridding myself of inherited co-ordinates to surreptitiously creep away from physicality into a form of forgetting, a land of molten memories, a land of pure time, from peak to peak.


All my thoughts focussed on destroying memory as I aimed to take Time back into the marrow of nothingness through a breach in thinking. I wanted to make myself infinitely small and crawl through this hole painstakingly punctured in the membranes of time itself. The gamble could only be achieved of course if I myself became nothing, so slight as to be invisible. I could not personally get in the way of my experiment. I had to be absent a priori.

I sought out ditches, caverns, dimly lit grottoes where a terrifying obscurity heralded an infinite optimism and a beautiful forgetting. I was on a journey through darkness to the other side of the night, to the humble acceptance of a new dawn as nothing. Here, I whispered to myself: there is blindness in seeing so let us close our eyes. There is too much noise, too much useless music so let us create silence. I shall sculpt nothingness. Non-time will dance through my fingers. This is my obstinate objective, my aim and my hope. I call it freedom, although you could say that I am trapped in paradox. I know that the words I use are inadequate to express this venture, but there are no others. I will follow the poet and pray the non-religious prayer: Accept paradox and the sky’s thundering. Yes, I am getting there.

Instinct guided all my movements. Improvisation was everything. My words had to be bled of moments. I forced myself to write only in states of fullness or total emptiness. Nothing in between. Events spoke through me and I simultaneously freed myself of what I never could become in fact.

There is euphoria in the renting open of time. There is a hilarious passage through, out and into an outside world of wonders. Something like paradise in this hell, something like a vision after a season in hell. Our eyes can’t believe what they see because believing always comes after; hence we can truly write what we see without seeing it. We can laugh without scorn and hatred. So it is with these movements of thought, which come as they are written. O patience and song! O navigation in rivers undone!

The time sculptor is here again. He left and came back. He withdrew into the sea to live with the colour green, where the scorching Mediterranean sun is his friend, he said:

Be patient, sometimes we need to begin at the end before discovering the middle without beginning or end. Keep moving, these pages are infinite.

The Time Sculptor counts grains of sand in dunes of night. He is an undoing and a running. He is a pool of infinity. Non-time can be written.