Directory of Lost Causes

I think it's visiting, or was. I asked someone else if she'd seen it there, and she said she hadn't, so I think it was there temporarily. There was a kind of plaque on it, but I can't remember what it said. I think I might have got the bit about it falling from the sky from the plaque. You probably don't get much of an idea of the size of the thing from the photo, but it was fairly large, probably about as tall as I am. It must be very heavy, I should think. I suppose it got there the way statuary gets to museums and so on, however that is.

Thank you. As you say, it has a sad quality. I also felt it had a strange, futuristic sense of tranquility, but maybe that's just me. I have often had visions of a future world (beyond mechanical technology), which resembles a kind of second Eden. But it's hard to describe.

Possibly, but I've never really conceived of it as death, but as a vaguely sci-fi Utopia in which, for instance, people's telekinetic abilities are all highly developed and creativity does not require conflict and destruction to fuel it, but overflows naturally from the well of dreams.

I wonder if I can find any fragments now that hint at it, apart from the sculpture of Emily Young. I know there was a book of pictures that I used to peruse often as a child that had the quality I'm trying to describe, but I cannot remember the names of any of the artists. They were probably all a little bit New Agey - it was air-brushed kind of stuff, but not as tacky as the unicorn-and-rainbow fare you see everywhere these days.

This fragment, from Bowie's Oh You Pretty Things seems to contain a hint of it:

I think about a world to come

Where some books were found by the Golden Ones,

Written in pain, written in awe

By a puzzled man who questioned

What we were here for


I imagine our resplendent descendents (there's a possible song-title there) in some kind of beautiful, but spartan cave, alive with strange ambience, excavating a cache of books (for which they now have no need, all their creativity and philosophy being as transient as the dreams from which it comes), and finding a volume by T.S. Eliot there, and reading it and scratching their heads at the maze of pain that existed when people were trapped in linear time:

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

In death's dream kingdom

These do not appear:

There, the eyes are

Sunlight on a broken column

There, is a tree swinging

And voices are

In the wind's singing

More distant and more solemn

Than a fading star.


Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer --


Not that final meeting

In the twilight kingdom


Etcetera.

Thank you.