Shell and Time I, II, III
Color Pencil on Paper, Digital (Procreate)
2024
I
Whether I or someone else succeeded was not important: all it needed was for one of us to manage to make an endless spiral and time would exist, that would be time. But now I come to the most difficult thing of all to say: to talk of time, that thing that never stays up, that unravels, that collapses like a bank of sand, that is as multifaceted as saline crystals, as ramified as a coral reef, as porous as a sponge…

II
…everything that was left or buried was a sign of something else, the imprint of fish-bones in clay, the carbonized petroliferous forests, the Texas dinosaur’s footprint in the mud of the Cretaceous period, the splintered pebbles of the Paleolithic period, the mammoth’s carcass found in the Beresovka tundra with the remains of the buttercups it had grazed on twelve thousand years previously still in its teeth, the Venus of Willendorf, the ruins of Ur, the Dead Sea scrolls…

III
Your history is the opposite of ours, the opposite of the history of what by moving has not arrived, of what has been lost in order to survive: the hand that modelled the vase, the bookcases that burned at Alexandria, the way the scribe spoke, the flesh of the mollusc that secreted the shell…

—— Shell and Time, The Complete Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino