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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.

Footnotes (‘I will not hide from you anymore’):

1. ‘Daughter’s of Jerusalem’...From Luke’s narrative, chapter 23. The rest of the quote reads ‘For behold, the days are coming when they will say ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.’ then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us.’ For if they do these things in the green tree, what will happen in the dry?’ (Italics added)

2. Sappho: ancient Greek poetess very close to Franny before her illumination (which is yet to be documented).

3. St. John in his first epistle makes no vague or “nice” assertion, but in definite, simplistic exactness, making science of metaphor, defining God poetically, writes that ‘God is light’ and ‘God is love’ (I John 1.5, 4.8). And onward, from those statements--always taken in too quickly, slightly, and without making the popular and selfish insistence of modern (or gluttonously post-modern) norms and conceptions forced upon the non-modern, we see, not separate from the existence of God, the bringing together of love and light, scientific in its bare preciseness. Not some overeager youth in the face of the alterer of history, the separator of ages, but an elder, decades beyond the night and morning of the Son, wrote these fertile words dwelling upon the things unchanging--and having dwelt upon them (and not fruitlessly) for some time. St. John, unlike Sappho, was not interested in authorship, much like the writer of ‘Way of a Pilgrim’--which is what gets to Franny: being the opposite of Sappho’s ‘someone in some future time will think of us’ (which is near to the heart, I believe, of the central issue of the artist and art-making). St. John’s purpose was not in authorship (and one must admit purpose as being akin to foundation, or that a thing’s function has its genesis in its maker, its purpose is as if just a bringing out of the inborn, the central, foundational, i.e. you don’t pick grapes off of a fig tree, simply (Confucius) ‘the one who can teach, but cannot teach his family does not exist’) – but in God’s authorship that light and love (morning, spring etc filial relationship, procreation etc) within the created realm is His direct reflection (metaphor).

4. Caddy: from William Faulkner’s ‘Sound and the Fury.’ Quote (‘hangnail’) from the appendix.

5. ‘...the surf of the sea driven and tossed by the wind’ From James 1.6, describing ‘double-mindedness,’
an ailment this age in its busyness, manyness and rush knows something of. Soren Kierkegaard writes
in Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, ‘is it not double-mindedness to live without any conviction, or more rightly, to live in the constantly changing fantasy that one has and that one has not a conviction’ (112) and ‘Is not despair simply double-mindedness? For what is despairing other than to have two wills?’ (61) This short but comprehensive description of the different symptoms of double-mindedness and its many quick excuses and false self-affirmations. All fading love and hope, half-heartedness and the despair of dying emotions and energy have to do with this. Kierkegaard offers (as does Psalm 73) ‘purity (or singularity) of heart’ as antithesis. James also speaks of the obtaining of this one and only in chapter 4.1-10 (in particular verses 8-10). ‘The Way of a Pilgrim’ also deals with this in particular without mentioning it (double-mindedness) by name and with mentioning quite often the name by which this thing is inexhaustibly grafted. A quote from Conor Oberst, deals with this desire for purity of heart (which is so close to Franny): ‘Lately I’ve been wishing I had one desire/ something that would make me never want another/ something that would make it so that nothing mattered/ all would be simple then’ (from ‘A Perfect Sonnet’ in the Every Day and Every Night EP).

6. Mammon: or riches, wealth and their illusory value. see Matthew‘s narrative 6.24.

7. The other, more hasty (Esau-like) and senseless use of Christ’s name.

8. Job 1.19.

9. See John 15.1-11. I John 4.15 in relationship with the Pilgrim’s teaching of the Jesus Prayer.

10. From JD Salinger’s ‘Franny and Zooey’ – nearly perfect in its directness and simplicity. Some weeks after her episode with Zooey.