Ouroboros

THOUGHTS AT EASTER 2025

As it’s almost Easter again, this time in 2025, our thoughts turn to resurrection, to the Eternal Return of spring, of Persephone out of the hell of winter, and to what resurrection looks like at Tippet Rise.

My favorite line from Eliot is a phrase he in fact stole from Heraclitus, line 129 of The Dry Salvages: “And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.”

As Quantum Physics has now discovered, and as Heraclitus seemed to know already, time isn’t directional. Nothing at Tippet Rise came about because of time, a deadline, a linear progression.

Sculptures appeared because we saw deeper into the land, into what it was, into what would magnify it, into forms that would themselves be expanded by their dialogue with the contours of the land.

We feel the magnetism in the rocks; we feel the connection they are constantly making with the sky, the way lightning forms a bond between static electricity in a cloud and some catalyst in the soil, until the bond breaks, and the charge returns to the sky (although it looks like the opposite, that lightning has struck from the cloud to the ground).

We don’t even know what magnetism is, but we know it when we feel it. It’s one of the forces that shape the land, that originate with the iron in the sun. The iron in the earth could only have been born in the furious heat of the stars. Anything with 26 protons in it is too complex to be created in the comparatively low temperatures found on earth.

When we see the mama cloud formations, udders in the sky, that imitate the folds of the coulees and canyons of Montana, we see the symmetry, the symbiosis, the similar patterns of nature. We see how poetry names a part and suggests the whole, how only poetry has the flexibility of language necessary to describe the indescribable symmetries we see around us, the correspondences between sculptures and space, between music and sculpture. If architecture is frozen music, then sculpture is frozen language, and land is frozen air.

So at this juncture, when spring emerges as it always does, we’d like to think about how we imagine time.

Anything we think comes from who we are, who we’ve been, what we’ve read. So our thoughts about the future come from Greek and German philosophy, from poets like T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.

And especially from paying attention to the messages hidden in the sculptures at Tippet Rise. Exploring what we’ve already got.

What we’d like to do at Tippet Rise is not to go forward, but to go deeper.

Existence isn’t backwards or forwards. It’s not about progress, or direction. Time has no direction. It’s entangled, like the weavings of willows in Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams.

As Zarathustra said, all things are entwined, ensnared, enamored.

There is in quantum physics an electrical grid which has been here since before existence. This grid entangles the universe in itself.

And so matter doesn’t progress; it’s not directional: it rearranges, endlessly, what is already there, as Ensamble Studio’s Beartooth Portal rearranges the dirt and stone beneath it, the way it imitates the bearteeth themselves, spires forced out of the earth by volcanic pressure.

And so the challenge to time is to take time, to recognize and explore how we recycle our own components.

“Ouroboros” is a poem I wrote on Easter Sunday a couple of years ago, about recycling.