The Burrowers

We have filled the day with work. It is like walking for miles down a long dark tunnel. After the first mile or so you begin to think about the men or women who made the tunnel. You admire their persistence and realise you are in fact admiring yourself. You do not think this a good thing and your modesty shuts you down for a while. Then instead of counting the miles you start counting the strides: you go all macro. There is a scent in the air, which you cannot identify, and you hope it is not the stench of failure. This does not matter as your only task now is to keep on walking. You think big again and see the route of the tunnel in your head like a slice-diagram of a train-map done by a brilliant twelve-year-old. It’s only after another twenty miles or so that you begin to realise there is in fact another track, a second one, running alongside you. This is the track belonging to the artist. You nod and feel the same sense of relief the 51st Highland Division must have felt in the North African desert when after days of isolation in a vast and lonely place they suddenly caught sight of their first German soldiers. You continue. There is still much to do. The other track is no longer relevant as you tighten your chest and march purely on willpower. You know you have come far but also you know you must go further. Is this the work ethic? Is this blind faith? You start groping for tunnel quotes. ‘Carve a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.’ That’s one. (Martin Luther King, Jr.) Or how about the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s strange line, ‘Will our life not be a tunnel between two vague clarities? Or will it not be a clarity between two dark triangles?’ Anyway, before you know it you are emerging cautiously from the tunnel. But where is the artist? Is she still down there?