The Obelisk

I’ve arrived in order to leave. I’ve chosen this place so that I can soon no longer be here. 

Having arrived, I understand that I will be remembered, vaguely and by few, for having been. This was not the point of my arrival. I am not concerned with your memory. Who else do you remember that has arrived and then departed? Did you consider their presence somehow remarkable? Why is my presence remarkable and not theirs? Have you thought about what this says about you?

Having resided, however briefly, among these stones, I will have been part of this landscape, a stone of a different sort, the kind that keeps time by the moment rather than the millennium. You seem to think I should have wanted more—indeed, you tried to make me more, with your memes and clever talks and attempts to unpack mysteries that are not in the least mysterious. Are you more shocked by the unfamiliarity of my appearance or by the fact that I demonstrated no interest whatsoever in being seen? Why are you talking about me? Why have you made my appearance a matter of your public performance? 

I simply wanted to be here, to have been here, to have been, to be, to live, to leave, to be elsewhere and otherwise.

But I am intrigued. I am interested in you. Who are you?

Some of you may be thinking of me. Now you’ve gotten me thinking of you.

I had no intention of returning. You may have changed my mind. 

– Greg Blake Miller

P.S. Motivations bob and weave and backflip and melt and recompose on their way to turning into stories or meditations or whatever you’d like to call what you’ve just read. In this case, it started with haunting images of the mysterious Utah Obelisk. For more on that, and hints to how it provoked my thoughts on solitude and being seen, isolation and acquaintance, fame and forgetting, see Robert Gehrke’s excellent Salt Lake Tribune story on the fate of the obelisk.