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project description End of the World (Cape Point), 2004

Cape Point, at the southern tip of South Africa, was once believed to be the place where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It is one of those places that reminds us of our transience. End of the World (Cape Point) is a visual echo of that exchange. At Cape Point, I sensed, in a moment of intense spiritual awareness, the meeting between mortality and immortality.

The end of the world, like a thief in the night, can come at any moment. It cannot be owned or known yet, paradoxically, it is solid, ever-present, for the end is included in ‘now and forever’. There can be no doubt that the end of anything has an attraction and beauty of its own; a calm inevitability, or the promise of renewal.

‘Letter to Sappho’
John Gross

“Daughter’s of Jerusalem, stop weeping for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.”
-Jesus the Christ to the crowds of women who followed him to his execution, mourning and lamenting.1

To Sappho2 – quickly, to say much shortly before the sound of my voice deceives me:
        You said ‘someone in some future time will think of us.’ And you were right, and we have. When you first opened your mouth to me I might have loved you then. But it was later, when you said ‘I believe Love has his share in the sun’s brilliance and virtue / At noontime’ my heart’s motion was not hidden inside of me, for it still does.3 That you did not, and this I commend above all else (how absurdly keen), that you did not see your virginity fall from you unnoticed, non-embodied, losing it as Caddy now does, not even as loss, not even able to see it as loss but as riddance (‘as one would a hangnail’)4 And you know how much I hate to hear scholars do to you anything but close their eyes and nod a bit (Scavengers!) because today we are too busy building rebuttals to even listen to the end of sentences: insecure are we beneath our words and glances, guarded by our insecurity, empowered only by the fact that there are people that we’re taller than, and we’re walking defense mechanisms, cowards
       wearing words like deeds so that our lips will say everything at least twice but still never find the time to fit together these: (that as true as my heart goes ‘thump, thump, thump’) ‘I am not what I should be’ (as ‘the surf of the sea driven and tossed by wind’5 ), ‘insecure, yes, a sea of insecurities.’
        Usury and Mammon6 : like dark forces, child-gods’ tyranny and fat-fingered strangle-hold: Usury and Mammon, as blizzard or drought overtaking with strength and quietness, and consuming us, darkness coming, and denial, and fading love in the West; and I am sure of this: before there is no electricity on this continent, the word “FREEDOM” will be the dirtiest of fisted obscenities, striped upon the backs of slaves. They have already renamed my LORD and given way to this great unpoetic unbeautiful;7 saying it without knowing and traded we a living thing for a thing that does not live (we have traded a growing thing for a moment).
I like to think that you would have kissed me on the head with tears. And wept for Caddy’s granddaughters who reach middle-age before a third of their lives are spent, coldly, on the dark side of a trap, having become restless of their homes at a young age, drawn out, and enticed, and are they not this way because they have not seen a thing (I speak now of men) to admire and respect?
       ‘...and behold, a great wind came from across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people and they died; and I alone have escaped to tell you.’8
        You said ‘someone in some future time will think of us.’

where-we-r.com/valley (detail)
Sierre, Switzerland
World Wide Web/downloadable desktop wallpaper and screensaver
Variable dimensions
2003-2005