PERMANENCE

My good friend the sculptor contacted me. He had finished another one and needed an extra set of hands to move the piece from the construction yard to the site.

I showed up and we stood back and looked at the piece. Rusted, scarred steel I-beams bolted with huge hardware, cantilevered into the air, easily 15 feet tall. It looked comfortable in the junkyard atmosphere of the sculpture yard. It was unnamed.

We made a plan. He had a site picked out. We would dismantle the bolts, load it onto his truck in pieces. The truck had a lifting crane, generator and portable welding gear. We would drive to the site, erect the damn thing, dust off our hands and drive home. I was in.

We drove a solid day. The site was a giant field of grass. It looked like it saw humans twice a year at mowing time. There was no sign of habitation in sight. The only evidence of visitation was the mowed grass. I wondered but didn’t ask.

We slept under an innocent sky, a sky that never suspected that one day it would be shotgunned with satellites, stress tested by artificial light. We spoke ourselves to sleep. Aside from logistics, the mission was never mentioned, we were immersed in the environment, we were irrelevant.

The next morning, we worked. The process of erecting a giant rusted steel sculpture is sweaty, dangerous, at points bloody, frustrating, calculated, miscalculated, onerous, hilarious, and incremental. The sun fried us, the bugs tried to evict us. It took most of the day. It was then time for the coup de grace - welding the bolted sections in place.

He cranked up the generator. The smell of gasoline and exhaust slashed the honeysuckle aromas of the previous night. The tension of opposites was undeniable - i was alive. I watched him weld, enjoying the tainted, nourishing air.

He finished. We stood back and surveyed. The unnamed thing seemed to fist-fight the heavens, blow for blow. It stood not in rebellion, but in defiance. Its power was palpable. It might not win, but it might never lose.

His face was serious. “They’ll never move that.”

On the ride home, i metabolized the moments.

I had given myself and all my energies to the unnamed thing. I had eaten only to build it, cut my hands and bled to husband it. I had slept for it, never questioned it. I treated it as a beloved object, a piece of it would dwell in me forever. I knew that the permanence of it was illusory, that didn’t bother me one fucking bit. It would see a thousand wounds and flowers, the cycles that compose the mathematics of the earth’s rotations, the private traffic of animals passing beneath it. It didn’t matter whether anyone ever moved it. The only permanence it truly possessed was the spirit that drove it into existence.