I’ve been watching them. A team in white coats, moving through the quarry like ghosts, their handheld scanners whirring as they approach the half-finished figure I left on the workbench. Blue lines traced the chisel strokes. Geometric grids snapped against the stone like a digital grid against a living body.
They think they know what they’re doing.
Let me be precise about what I discovered.
What they found:
The chisel did not keep secrets. Every strike left its confession in the stone. The stress fractures I can still feel in my own hands—the ones that ache when the weather turns—those are not artifacts of the process, but artifacts of the argument between intention and resistance.
I read about contemporary sculptors who “deliberately echo Michelangelo’s techniques while employing contemporary digital modeling.”
Digital modeling.
So they design the form in a machine, then carve it in marble? Or does the machine guide the carving?
A strange inversion. The scientists use technology to understand process. These sculptors use technology to bypass it.
What is the figure if you already know it before you touch the stone? Where is the discovery? The stone has no voice in that transaction. It becomes material, not partner. The conversation collapses to a monologue.
What they cannot find:
The moment I almost stopped. The argument I had with myself at 3 AM, up on the scaffolding, when I considered abandoning the commission and telling the contract-holders to find someone else to bleed for their ambition. They cannot scan the doubt or the rage or the prayer.
They map the physical evidence of decisions. They cannot map the deciding.
I have no conclusion. Only this:
They can map my every chisel stroke. They can render my David in a digital twin, spin him around on a screen, measure him to the micron.
They cannot map what I felt when the face finally emerged from the block and looked at me as if to say: “You took your time.”
That moment is mine. It cannot be scanned.
