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The Sasse: Where love stories develop between art and viewer | ||||
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As Close to Heaven as We Can |
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"Hence, let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away." Gutzon Borglum wrote that about a mountain he would not live to finish. He was sixty when he started. Seventy-three when he died, in 1941, with the work still underway. He filled sketchbooks first. Built small clay models before he touched the rock. Every proportion on that mountain came from something he could hold in his hands. He didn't know if he'd live to see it done. He built it anyway. That's the difference between planning and believing. Planning needs to know how it ends. Believing doesn't. Fourteen years, start to finish. Money ran out more than once. Whole seasons lost to weather, whole years lost to funding that hadn't arrived yet. None of that stopped when he wanted it to. It stopped when it stopped, and then the work picked back up, because the mountain was still there and so was he. His son finished what remained the following year, and stopped exactly where his father would have stopped. Nothing added beyond the plan. Nothing resolved that wasn't already decided. Every artist does some version of this, at whatever scale they've got. A studio instead of a mountain. A single canvas instead of four faces sixty feet tall. You don't get to choose whether the money comes on time, or whether the year cooperates, or whether you'll be the one who gets to call it finished. You choose to start with something small enough to hold. You work until you can't. You leave it in hands you trust. The mountain wears down eventually. Wind and rain, like he said. That was never really the point. photo | public domain |
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