Tidal sidle, a bridge

It had been seven months since I last held a saw in my hands with the intention of using it for something. Time had passed, spun itself out, become tangled, unravelled, and now seemed to have settled down. The tool had become unfamiliar to me. The calluses on my palms had disappeared, the wounds on my fingers had healed, and in a cautious attempt to spin yarn, I gathered my saw, hatchet and pocket knife. I walked to the hardware store and bought a ball of sisal to tie things down with. At the bakery, I picked up a few pastries and a large bottle of water. The sun was shining as it had been doing for almost a month now: excessively. 

*

I have started something new. I haven't been without art for this long in recent years. By art, I mean 'the play of meanings'. I have sketched and painted, pencil, charcoal, watercolour, and I have greatly enjoyed the portraits, still lifes and landscapes. I have devoted myself to the world as it presented itself to me. Nothing else. I thought that perhaps it would be gone forever, the desire to play with meanings. Sometimes I even wondered if it had ever really fascinated me. That perhaps it was a pose, self-deception, madness. But no. I really enjoy creating. I like to do it for relaxation: the portrait, the drawing. But I also like to play it as an effort: the game of meanings, the condensation of what is there by adding what is not yet there. Looking, making, thinking and feeling. 

*

Around ten o'clock in the morning, I set off for a place in Ghent that is sandwiched between the Scheldt, an E17 motorway slip road and the Ghent-Brussels railway line. It is a small collection of verges with a canal running between them, a lost piece of greenery between functional structures. Willows, maples and hawthorns grow slender and densely intertwined. Dead wood, brambles and nettles make it quite impenetrable, and rubbish lies everywhere, half covered by fallen leaves and humus. These are things that have gone off the bend on the motorway slip road. Intentionally or unintentionally. At first, I felt the urge to clean it up, to simply gather all the items together so that the place would be 'cleansed'. So that there would only be rubbish in one place. I didn't do it because it's everywhere. It seems to have sunk into the ground. It has decayed to a greater or lesser extent. There is often still cola in it. Or beer. Or Golden Power. The rubbish has become part of the litter layer.
 

The shadows of the trees move across the courtyard like the hands of a clock. I cleared away some dead willows and maples, whose slender, straight trunks provided the perfect material for my construction. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to make yet. Right across the courtyard, where the sloping verges meet, runs a ditch filled with dark water; a mosquito-infested pool that stinks of decay. It would be a bridge. One by one, I dragged the trunks to a collection point on the verge facing north. There, in the shade, I sorted the working material around noon. Long, supple trunks on one side; shorter and more brittle wood on the other. I ate my pastries and noticed while smoking that the shadows of the trees were parallel to the ditch at that moment. The entire ditch is therefore neatly oriented north-south; a clockwork in which I and my hunger also fit neatly.

*

At one point, the bridge was finished. I smoked and looked at what it had become: a simple bridge, spanning from bank to bank, from verge to verge. A bridge that is perpendicular to the direction of the canal and therefore oriented east-west. A horizontal structure in an otherwise vertical world of trees. What a bridge is to us is a gateway for the water. So much for the post factum form analysis. I did not make the thing for those reasons, with those factors in mind. Or perhaps I did have them in mind, but in any case not at the forefront of my mind. The bridge is the first work in a long time that arose from a strong need to create something. I limited myself to willow trunks and a ball of rope. I gave myself one day to make it.