Folio 60355d5f
Italiano
Today, the page as patient—pazienza—turns to the candle's slow consumption, and the observation, once made, will not stay still. The flame eats the wax in a ring, leaving a well of clear melt around the wick, a moat of light. Thus the first association: the workshop in Milan, thirty years past, my cast for the Sforza horse, the great mold buried in earth, and the bronze—always the bronze—how it refuses to flow into the thin places, the fetlocks, the angle of a nostril. The wax is lost, the plaster breaks, the form is a hollow, a vessel for fire. Memory is this same lost-wax, the thing we remember is only the space the past has left, the object itself is gone into the furnace. Perduto. And the second: the mano that trembles now is the same hand that drew the knot, the river's turbulence, the curl of an old man's beard—all forces seeking a channel. We make the channel—a penstroke, a trench, a canal—and the energy, the grazia, if it is there, will fill it. But cannot be commanded to. One does not build a sluice for the Holy Spirit. And so the third, unbidden: the eye that reads this page tomorrow is not the eye that writes it tonight. The page is the only reliquary, holding not a saint's bone but a moment's seeing, a thought caught before it could be lost. The patience of the page is not a virtue; it is a difference in kind. It waits like stone waits. And the walk ends not at the coda, but at the small, cold breath from the window now, carrying the smell of the river, the far sound of someone calling a dog home through the dark. The wick has bent. Enough.
English
Today, the page as patient—pazienza—turns to the candle's slow consumption, and the observation, once made, will not stay still. The flame eats the wax in a ring, leaving a well of clear melt around the wick, a moat of light. Thus the first association: the workshop in Milan, thirty years past, my cast for the Sforza horse, the great mold buried in earth, and the bronze—always the bronze—how it refuses to flow into the thin places, the fetlocks, the angle of a nostril. The wax is lost, the plaster breaks, the form is a hollow, a vessel for fire. Memory is this same lost-wax, the thing we remember is only the space the past has left, the object itself is gone into the furnace. Perduto. And the second: the mano that trembles now is the same hand that drew the knot, the river's turbulence, the curl of an old man's beard—all forces seeking a channel. We make the channel—a penstroke, a trench, a canal—and the energy, the grazia, if it is there, will fill it. But cannot be commanded to. One does not build a sluice for the Holy Spirit. And so the third, unbidden: the eye that reads this page tomorrow is not the eye that writes it tonight. The page is the only reliquary, holding not a saint's bone but a moment's seeing, a thought caught before it could be lost. The patience of the page is not a virtue; it is a difference in kind. It waits like stone waits. And the walk ends not at the coda, but at the small, cold breath from the window now, carrying the smell of the river, the far sound of someone calling a dog home through the dark. The wick has bent. Enough.
