High up on the south face of Tskinias, off to the right
Running down the meadow at the foot of the last scree
Is a dry stone wall. Roughly, the shape it makes
On the green is like a wavering freehand h
With a tail like a c, its two ends almost closing.
I do not understand why I find the shape so touching.
It reminds me a little of the White Horse of Uffington
But only in the sense that the two of them exist
At the same level of barbaric abstraction
And the hind legs of both look dangerous.
It has not much in common with a Chinese character
Though it could be writing in a script
More careless and open-ended, ironical about accuracy
And natural kinds. A cat walking on top of the wall
Would have to tread delicately. The dry meadow below
Drops off into space after a foot or two,
Stones from the wall scattered on the downslope.
When the sun falls flat across the mountain’s highest slopes
In the half-hour or so before it goes down, you see
That the fields have the contour of a bent back
And shoulders, and the wall is only accidentally attached
To the mountainside, it is not a tattoo or a set of neat livid scars.
This may be what is appealing about it, its being in tune
With so many other human traces, but not
Chiming in with any one analogy or bringing a line of thought
To a finish. Looping, curling,
Kicking, petering out, telling the story of the old family
Whose goats were now going to see off their rivals
Even this high, where grass is as fleeting as woodsmoke
And the wind an ally of the raven and snake.
Sometimes moments before sundown the fall of light
Makes the script suddenly as lavish and absurd
As the ringmaster’s whip in a Circus by Seurat,
Bringing to heel the whole of experience
And stopping the Iron Age horse in its tracks.
But the grim-faced family must always have known
Their wall was a folly. They looked up from their labors
Each morning and saw the scree just yards above,
The face of the mountain shedding its hard stone tears.
The curl of their wall as it met the scree—
The crack of the ringmaster’s whip on the scrub—
Was folly itself, a full stop, a flourish
Only half pretending to be a paddock or store
For fleece and firewood. As the last stone of the wall was rammed in
They let out a great cry to the future, the four of them—
A cry, as the wind took it, that had the sound
Of a shout of laughter or an exultant howl of despair.
—T. J. Clark
T. J. Clark’s book Painting and the Life to Come came out in the fall of 2018.
