O if you knew! If you knew! How it has been. How the ladies of the house would talk softly in the moonlight under the orange trees of the courtyard, impressing upon me the sweetness of their voices and something mysterious in the quietude of their lives. O the heaviness of that air, the perfume of jasmine, pale lights against the stones of the courtyard walls.

Monument! Monument! How will you ever know!

…Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take

When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.

It has been necessary to submit to vacancy in order to begin again, to clear ground, to make space. I can allow nothing to be received. Therein lies my triumph and my mediocrity. Nothing is the destiny of everyone, it our commonness made dumb. I am passing it on. The Monument is a void, artless and everlasting. What I was I am no longer. I speak for nothing, the nothing that I am, the nothing that is this work. And you shall perpetuate me not in the name of what I was, but in the name of what I am.

I begin to sense your impatience. It is hard for you to believe that I am what you were. It is a barren past that I represent -one that would have you be its sole guardian. But consider how often we are given to invent ourselves; maybe once, bur even so we say we are another, another entirely similar.

Stories are told of people who died and after a moment come back to life, telling of a radiance and deep calm they experienced. I too died once but said nothing until this moment, not whising to upset my friends or to allow my enemies jokes about whether I was really alive to begin with. It happened a couple of years ago in March or April. I was having a coffee. I know I was dead just a few minutes because the coffee was still warm when I came back. I saw no light, felt no radiance. I saw my life flash before me as a succession of meals and I felt full. This feeling was to give way to an image of waste. How much would be lost! A box placed underground with me inside would never be right. And then I thought of The Monument. It was this promise of adequate memorial that brought me back to life, to my room and my coffee.