(Black Chapel, Theater Gates, Serpentine, 2022)

I can tell the infinite child by the leaves it leaves on tables weighted with small stones.

It’s June, midday, the pavilion waits for an event, it has a large, round hole in the roof. A man plays a piano.

I realize almost everyone around me has small dogs on leashes, either small dogs on leashes or small children.

I wonder if any of these children are immortal. I know that the dogs are in their infinite world. I watch the clouds through the hole in the roof.

When we first learned language we became mortal. Keats was right to call the Nightingale immortal: things without language are immortal, cannot be transformed into anything else.

It is not just that to be unaware of death makes you immortal, that your dog lives in the moment, it’s more than that: the investment of language situates us in consciousness, which is an effect of time.

The leap we take as a species, onto a new tree. Our awareness kills us. We are selves, and mortal. Small children, not yet.

I remember endlessly explaining time to my children as if it was something simple, and they winced: I was actually wounding them.

As I was writing this, one of the custodians leapt up and said guys stop this. A large, bronze bell hung low on its cradle, and two people had swung it but it hadn’t struck yet. Only when they left did the bell start tolling.

We need the murmuring sky’s reply in order to sense the sentence’s finitude, to become involved in whatever language takes apart from us. It’s a screen, it’s a layer of paper between us and what we sense.

A child wakes with cloudy fingers, clouded head fuzzing. Clay opens itself in her skin.
The dogs have enamelled eyes, without knowledge. How terrible to be in the room in which we need to see what is it that we need language for in order to remember, to place things in time. Memory is another language, inserted.

That night the deer step delicately around us. They know the route of forest paths here, before there was time, a pavilion, a bell. We have all gone, hours, centuries ago.