Mythopoesis of Retrograde Prometheus
Reading by Christian Nirvana Damato
This theory-fiction dialogue was composed as a part of the research project that culminates in the upcoming book: Retrograde Prometheus: Subjectivity & Computation (2026).
Act I – Abiogenesis
Human beings are like tightrope walkers: their bodies are upright, tense, anticipating their next movements, fighting against gravity. The search for balance is linked to the upright posture, which is a necessary condition for the former; indeed, we would say that one cannot exist without the other. If we are born human animals, we are already on the tightrope. The emergence of reason and rationality given by the upright posture is first and foremost the emergence of a desire for stability that walks on the attractive void. For the tightrope walker, who is the human being, stability is a state of tension, which on the surface appears as a condition of peace.
Stability is not a physical and objective given, but rather ideological and subjective. Instability is the force of gravity hanging beneath the rope on which we stand trembling. The human figure is a tightrope walker. Balance is dictated by a state of inner tension and surface calm. When we are tired and loosen our grip for a moment, the fear of the void assails us. And so that desire for stability reemerges, which in reality never leaves us...
Act II – On the rope
His name is Prometheus, a tightrope walker born on the rope and condemned to eternal tension while the void below attracts him.
Retrograde Prometheus: They called me Prometheus, a funny and accelerationist name for a son. I had no desire to move forward, but my name prevented me from doing so. That year, I had moved fifteen times in my life. Thirty years, fifteen moves, an average of one every two years. With every leap forward, I left a piece of my past behind, losing objects and memories with every jump from city to city. Jumping like a flea from one place to another, I ended up living in an eternal present, losing everything I left behind. My mind was my only hard drive, albeit a broken one, where I stored a past that I didn't regret, except for the fact, I tell myself, that I could have done better, that I could have done it EARLIER. A common story. A generational obsession. Do it quickly, move, run, speed up. Take the leap. My name didn't kick against its established role, and neither did I. Every time in my life, I thought I wanted to achieve a certain amount of stability—call it that if you like—only to then no longer recognize myself or want to get out of it. We are both negentropic and entropic beings. But which comes first? Is one factor more fundamental than the other? It's not yin and yang, a duality, a dichotomy; it must be a Matryoshka doll.
There are those who, in poetic and philosophical terms, claim that uncertainty is movement and openness, while certainty is closure, but how much does this uncertainty terrify us? The thrill of a fleeting love or a body brushed in the shadows is no match for the uncertain anxiety of the future. And we embrace uncertainty and contingency with a smile only when we have struggled, planned, and anticipated this very possibility of looking at the unknown with a smile for a long time. Otherwise, the only time we look at this void and laugh is when stability is untouchable, distant, or removed: in this case, we are either very small or very drunk.
When Prometheus—the tightrope walker—looks down into the empty mirror below the rope, he often perceives himself differently: he sees in his actions and in those of the world a retrograde movement, as certain planets do. Then he returns to reality, looks straight ahead and tenses his muscles before the rope plays any nasty tricks: his desire for stability always walks on the threshold of need, constantly overflowing, exceeding. The rope is a path already traced by someone else, Prometheus can only remain tense and anticipate the oscillations, getting used to his condition and accepting the pressing tension of acceleration, beginning to enjoy it, tuning in to the oscillating temporality of the rope.
When the rope of progress begins to swing harder and harder, Prometheus becomes even more convinced that his desire is for stability and advancement, but he does not realize that the strong tremor of the rope is causing him to take steps backward as he continues to anticipate. The illusion is advancement, but this seems to be necessary to maintain muscle tension. Prometheus is Retrograde.
Act III – conversations with acceleration and cynicism
The rope on which life hangs is a theater of oscillating encounters.
Acceleration: Prometheus, you are still young but you have little time, remember that. Life is like that, the older you get, the more time expands, but when you are young, time flies and does not return, so you have to run at the same speed. Do you see how they run around you? Do you see society running, how it runs? You have to work until you bleed. And you have to elbow your way through, be cunning.
Retrograde Prometheus: I see it, and I feel like I'm never running fast enough. There are people who don't need to stop, they can follow their passions without hindrance, without the contingency of money to earn a living. How can you accelerate when you have to stop in the repetitive acts of an alienating job? You tell me to accelerate, but who are you telling?
Acceleration: Prometheus, if you need to stop, that's your problem. My argument is universal, like chaos and the search for stability. You're turning it into a vulgar social issue... Capitalism should have taught you that by now. There's no need to stoop so low. If you need to stop, then you'll just have to run even faster. It's all up to you, and you alone.
Cynicism: Prometheus, don't you know we're treated like racehorses? Do you want to ignore that? Do you think you can change anything? If you become inconvenient, you'll be sedated, locked up somewhere, or slaughtered, it's up to you. You're thirty years old, you have to think about settling down, you understand how brutal the world is. Be grateful for your small good deeds and don't be a megalomaniac, it's useless. I know you like hope, I know you want to convince yourself that art saves us and that small things produce big changes, physics says so too, doesn't it? The flap of a butterfly's wings ends up causing a tornado on the other side of the world. But here we have built laws and bureaucracies, power relations and destructive technologies, economic and financial systems supported by irreversible imbalances and equilibriums. Capitalism responds to the law of
entropy, and we will sink with it. The degradation we are witnessing in the 21st century promises to be worse than that of the previous century. But this catastrophe is yet to be lived, there is no room for utopias, you can only hope in small revolutions of solidarity with your neighbor or individual salvation, but you cannot change the irreversibility of entropy. We know how nice it is to say that there is an alternative to capitalism. It is an almost childish thought that makes us feel better psychologically, but it is also a lie, a self-deception. Get used to it and save yourselves. There is no hope unless you listen to at least some suggestions for acceleration.
Retrograde Prometheus: I hate you, I hate you with all my heart, I hate you because I think that deep down you are tragically right. I have no choice.
Cynicism: Well done, you're starting to think straight. The sleep of reason breeds monsters, remember?
Retrograde Prometheus: And in a sense, the dream of reason has spawned monsters in your name, Cynicism. So many lives you embody. But unfortunately, we cannot help but dream, even in this sense. The problem is the dreams of power. This fucking rope, this desire for stability, is nothing but an arrow towards extinction. We are a species sick with technology, empathetically selective, with a mind as ingenious as it is potentially cruel. This desire for stability, combined with progress, has brought nothing but wars, conquests, colonialism, capitalism, genocide, and massacres as forms of economic growth. The well-being of the population is an appendage, a pretext for capitalist reproduction, the maintenance or growth of power and profit.
Cynicism: Good, I see we understand each other. We are alike.
Retrograde Prometheus: I don't think so. Do you know what the difference is between you and me? I'll explain it to you. Those who blindly follow you end up being a rotten part of this whole circus. You are a very good critic, nothing you say is wrong. However, blindly following you means acting like everyone else, acting like everyone else because that's the way the world is. The difference between you and me lies in expressing a sensitivity, a desire to cling to the traits that are still human. Now let me tell you a story.
Act IV – Acceleration tires: hypercapitalism and depression
Retrograde Prometheus: In the summer, I go back to my hometown. While I'm reading Gilles Deleuze's The Exhausted in the room I've made for myself at my grandmother's house, a litany rises from upstairs: an old man, widowed and completely alone, sings his daily prayer. I can't understand all the words, just a melodic mantra that at one point intones "have mercy on us." It is a desperate lament in an atheist building where every Madonna or crucified saint framed on the old white staircases is merely a simulacrum of the failure of the sacred, empty and tired faces in images so prayed to that they have lost all their therapeutic power, emptied of all symbolic charge and power. Broken voices, tired minds, hanging limbs, the entropic death of the closed system of a public housing building in a small provincial town. Everything is peeling and decaying, the tuff walls like synapses, tree bark and brain, symbolic of the human vegetable and spiritual, everything hanging on a rope that is now slack, surrendered to gravity. An old age that is not too peaceful, not in line with what is said. The white mill house is burning and all we have left is the muffled breath of two poor, dirty lungs to put out the fire.
Progress moves backwards with recoil. Moving forward is decay, but it is always a matter of perspective, of obligations and impositions, of contexts and postures. Progress moves backwards with recoil when it is only a mask that perpetuates profit. In this sense, the human Prometheus is always retrograde. His movement is never truly his own; it is something else, it comes from elsewhere, it is mediated. Prometheus is forced to walk the tightrope, taught by someone else, inscribed, imposed and overwritten in suggested movements, made into law, and if he doesn't like it, if he wants to stand still, that movement, which is not really subjective, movement-as-such, is replaced by another body that takes its place. The movement of Retrograde Prometheus is expendable, replaceable, worthless and worth everything. If you don't move as prescribed, then you might as well die. Sometimes you have to die by law, sometimes you don't have to die by law, they have to keep you alive, one way or another, like a living dead person. The law does not care if you heal, your body, your mind, you must not hinder the normative flow of time and the regulated inhabiting of space.
When everything runs, everything competes, everything overtakes and clashes, sensitivity and extreme empathy become signs of a foretold extinction, diseases that can have different names. Take this and it will pass, you'll see, you'll run, take that and become an economic body. When everything runs, everything competes, everything judges, tramples and screeches, anxiety and loss of meaning increase, you can't keep up. But failure is banned and pausing is viewed with pity.
You cannot aspire to get out, you cannot rest easy without first going through the circles of hell between precarious jobs, predatory capitalist education, and schooling where competition and the tyranny of evaluation, rankings, numbers, tables, and scores reign supreme. This coveted tranquility is now a difficult, sometimes impossible or non-existent goal, insofar as it is not what you believe it to be. The path laid out makes the mind precarious and drains it, and more and more people are lost, wandering aimlessly in a labyrinth of efficiency and rationality that eliminates anyone who is wrong, errant, or surrendered, stuck or lost, annihilated by an inhuman society, made a living symptom of a sick system.
Anxiety, depression, psychosis.
Rush, harsh judgment, indifference, contempt, marginalization, efficiency, poverty, biometric classification mathematics for productive and economic purposes.
Anxiety, depression, psychosis.
Capitalism in its algorithmic rise runs, accelerating until it tires. It exhausts itself. At first tightrope walkers, it slowly puts us sitting on the rope, terrified. A situation that is distressing just to think about. Our whole body stretched out on the horizontal rope, tense. Clinging with our legs and arms, we remain motionless and unable to do anything else, paralyzed by terror, so much so that the only solution is no longer to seek balance, but to let ourselves fall and resolve the issue once and for all. This is an increasingly common condition. Every Retrograde Prometheus risks ending up lying,
clinging and paralysed on the rope. Without order and without chaos, a limbo where every climb seems impossible.
An inhuman rope, an inhuman swing, an inhuman accelerated temporality. Stop, if you can, if you are able to. If you must, you will receive a kick or a sedative, or both.
A mind that falls ill today is often ill in relation to time. The present moment in which we are sad, depressed, or anxious is always closely linked to the traces of the past and the imaginative predictions of our future, in a society where productivity, efficiency, competition, precariousness, and proletarianization are accelerating at an ever-increasing pace.
The same logic, I think, is that of psychotropic drugs, which respond to the rational structure of progress in terms of sacrifice. Psychotropic drugs are not meant to cure, they are meant to generate profit and make the subject unobtrusive to the system. Health does not really matter: the sick must be functional, no matter whether they are alive, dead, or totally apathetic. They must not be a hindrance. Everything must be able to continue running around them. The healthcare economy is obviously one of the pillars of capitalist flows. Psychiatry is a technology of this economy. Psychiatry is an epistemology of technical applications in the pharmacological field for mental health care. Psychiatry absorbs the techno-scientific vision of capitalist progress. To this extent, psychiatry and technology are interconnected, as are scientific research and capitalism. When what is supposed to cure has its ideological roots in the same epistemic violence as what kills, then it can only—in most cases—postpone, if not aggravate, the problem.
You are all, in your own way, like me, Retrograde Prometheus, a human being not moved by movements that are not his own but which he assimilates, traces, remembers, and reproduces, reading them as his own, as arbitrary. He finds himself on the margins of the impossible. He cannot heal because he has no room to maneuver, and space, as we know, is given by time. If time is contracted, then space is reduced, claustrophobia advances, agoraphobia as well, the throat compresses, the human suffocates and paralyzes.
Without a new, dilated, diluted time, more and more humans will remain paralyzed on the rope, waiting for a miracle or for the void to swallow them up. Someone must reach out, because Prometheus cannot pull himself up on the rope by his hair. Today's society—where power is the real disease—is not designed to reach out to those in difficulty, but to make that body trampled, ignorable. The symptom must be silenced so that everything can flow at multiplied speeds. But symptoms, when silenced with violence, return to claim their denunciation.
The rope is frayed, and we end up lying in a row. The rope must be rebuilt, but what was once a tremor is now an earthquake.
Act V – The fairy tale of ζωή
Depression: I was passing by and heard you speaking, Prometheus. Cynicism and Acceleration, you have no idea of the harm you are causing in the world. You have poisoned the present and the future of thought, action, and desire in an already suffocating world. Now I will tell you a short contemporary fairy tale with a happy ending. It is about one of the many lives I live in human bodies.
ζωή suffers from major depression, a label given to her by a psychiatrist whose face and name she no longer remembers. A certain social context led her to develop low self-esteem and a general sense of guilt, anxiety about not succeeding in things, and the anguish of an essential loneliness outside the buzz of the people around her. She says that, since she is worthless, people do not really want her, do not respect her, and only indulge her. She always feels the finger of the world pointing at her, judging her, classifying her, regulating her, comparing her.
She has felt this since birth, loved in a way she cannot understand, a love that has created an interpretative divide that she still carries with her today. "Be afraid of the world, stay here." "Everything is approximate, that fear does not exist." Two pieces of advice, a perspective that immobilizes. An irreconcilable love: two implicit and opposing commands. ζωή lies stretched out on the rope and cannot move; getting up is a grueling effort, she feels the weight of gravity ten, a hundred, a thousand times stronger than normal.
ζωή grows, she contains within herself a world full of meaning, she is empathetic, so sensitive that she loses her lucidity. ζωή clashes with social models and stereotypes, with the artificiality of digital bodies and glossy success. Having internalized the broken duality of the advice, her paralysis is reflected in her dismorphia. You're not good enough, you're not enough. Every contrary message is a ploy, just pandering to her. ζωή clashes with impossible numbers, the quantification of appreciability, the false and impossible standards that drive her unconscious, and even though she knows rationally that she is beautiful and talented, every mirror distorts her image, cutting out her fears. ζωή starts college, projecting herself into the precarious future that afflicts her entire young generation. She sees a society of efficiency at all costs, where judgment, harsh grades, the tyranny of evaluation, endless and disappointing rankings, and poverty around every corner reign supreme. She feels this poverty as inevitable, as she has been accustomed to it, as she has been taught. She works all her life. For her, there is no alternative. But today's generation may not be able to do so, and if they do, they realize that it is a shitty life, that it loses its meaning because possibility and desire are captured and suffocated by a lack of time and energy. All this, all together, annihilates ζωή, θάνατος (Thanatos) takes over. A life vampirized to the point of removing the vitality that makes it meaningful can be deadly for an extremely sensitive person. What use is the world, this world, when one has been conceived and educated to be powerless? One cannot move, one remains stretched out on the tightrope with a broken desire that expresses itself in sobs.
But the world must run, progress must advance, there is no time to wait. All the time socially necessary to produce today, Marx would say, is too little time to heal, I would add. Life remains stuck on the tightrope, it needs help, help that is a path of climbing back up this rope, a path of
returning to desire, first and foremost to live. Psychotherapy, okay. Psychiatry, sometimes necessary, but be careful. Psychiatry adapts to systemic speed, and instead of healing a subject, it creates chemical combinations that render that body silent, helpless, trampled by those who continue to run, or at best enables it to run for a while, only to fall more and more often. The important thing is not to get in the way. To each their own rope, all parallel, very close together. Sometimes they cross like train tracks. You can't get in the way of others who are running.
Fortunately, ζωή has a good psychotherapist, but the road is long. She must rid her mind of all that education of powerlessness, those deep wounds that have broken her desire, leaving her sobbing alternately between her name and the echo of θάνατος. She also has to take medication. The drugs of narcocapitalist psychiatry destroy Ἔρως, eros. This is a symptom of the profound dysfunction of the drugs themselves. Psychotherapy and psychiatry itself must not, cannot remove eros, without which the capacity for sublimation is removed a priori; desire itself is denied, like a caged sun.
But this is how it is: ζωή tries to drag itself through life, every treatment seems to fail, every change of medication carries the risk of a fatal fall. It is a vile world. The brain is bent, attempts are made to create the right chemical balance, but it has not yet been found. Every change in therapy causes a shock to the brain. A shock of readjustment in a geological perspective of the skull as a world. Every shock creates disasters, and the shocks continue until a sort of balance is created among the ruins. But this is romanticism. This balance among the ruins has not yet been found, and sooner or later words will have to destroy the shocks, leaving room for flora. In a growing drug-entropic context, the mind breaks down and, one day, attempts to bring chaos to its extremes, seeking the anti-conservative balance of eternal rest, the entropic death of the universe of its mind.
The rope on which tightrope walkers walk is turned into a noose. Oxygen cannot pass, life loses consciousness, but is saved in time. The fog disappears, that mind is taken and sedated again, neutralized of all capacity for action.
ζωή attempts the entropic suicide of her universe because she does not believe she can find the balance imposed by the outside world. The future is precarious, everything crumbles and runs, the artificial nature around her is the mathematical-computational sublime of the race, of the mathematization of forced being, of the law of the strongest where the weakest is the most sensitive to a temporality made pathological by culture, politics, and economics. We have created a desire for stability that has no objects of desire but goals: we must achieve them. And in the journey, reversing everything, waiting becomes torment and paralysis, anxiety and—at the limits of endurance—renunciation of life itself. To this extent, desire thus constructed is deadly, a censorship of life. This happens when a sensitive and empathetic mind collides with the constructed logic of chaos and order, of the search for stability in a capitalist society. But only words, deconstructive and reconstructive words, can save life.
The therapy continues, and life finally understands the masquerade. Everything is covered in ridicule, everything is a farce, a crystal-clear clarity reveals itself to her, who is now able to give meaning to the world, but only by subtraction, by removing meaning from what seems to have it or what we are led to believe it has. Without this step, it is difficult to deviate towards personal
meanings that make life and experiences worth living. It is necessary to destroy the meanings that have already been given, because they are those that lead to a search for stability aligned with a temporality and a mathematization of being that is inhuman.
ζωή is reborn once and for all, having understood the deception of the narrative that dominates and gives orders to increase itself. ζωή returns to the world from the underworld of unnamed places called by acronym, having gone full circle from death to laughter. Between the two irons, the world in between, with the awareness of having passed from the opposite shore, and that it will no longer be able to see the world from the same perspective.
Act VI – Crisis
Retrograde Prometheus: Depression, is a beautiful story, a story of hope. Cynicism: a story of personal salvation, nonetheless.
Retrograde Prometheus: Not at all, without the sensitivity I mentioned earlier, without the humanity you strip yourselves of, ζωή would have already found death. Do you think this is an isolated case? The cynical law of the fastest is petty natural selection. If we have to live with panic, at least we should know its face, and to do that we need cooperation and dialogue, direct dialogue with panic itself, with the panic that takes hold of bodies.
Acceleration: However, yours seems to be a functional cooperation, an exorcism of panic whose ultimate goal is to get bodies running again.
Retrograde Prometheus: Let them do what they want. Cooperation helps bodies get back on their feet on the tightrope, enjoy the oscillations, desire. It is an exorcism of capitalism, propaganda, and cynicism itself, an awareness, a positive subjectivation. A culture of cooperation, a form of close critical orality. Everyone saves themselves and as many people as possible. Those who can must medicate, because there are always too many wounds. Those who are medicated will in turn learn to medicate.
Acceleration: remember that technology advances, the system accelerates, the individual must adapt.
Retrograde Prometheus: the individual collapses.
Acceleration: try to think of a solution, because there is no way out. You will not free others unless you first free yourself. In an accelerating world, you have to think strategically. You don't want to change the world with a torch or retreat to a hut, do you?
Retrograde Prometheus: I don't have the privilege to do so. The proletarian condition is always totally immersed in the historical present, in factories as well as in digital flows. One acts internally, modifies, creates errors, spaces of life, freedom, and movement.
Act VII – Retrograde motion
Prometheus, an individual like many others, a cog in the wheel of the world, realizes that he is part of this progress that in some way causes him to regress, yet he cannot grasp the cause, perhaps because he lacks the tools to understand it. Prometheus does not understand whether this retrograde motion is real or not. Is it regression that is illusory, or is it progress? What if both are real?
The retrograde motion of a planet may be real or illusory, but what does it matter? After all, it is always a movement opposite to what is expected. However, what is expected is not necessarily natural or normal. Consequently, the unexpected is not an anomaly of nature but can be a direct consequence of what is expected. The constant increase in natural disasters is directly linked to the idea of progress as a system. The same goes for wars and exploitation. These unexpected consequences are anything but unforeseen: they are precisely the rotten fruit of a generalized Prometheanism whose values of economic growth, excessive stability, and domination justify any means and any consequence, which is often not only expected but ignored.
Prometheus cannot feel guilty for being born himself; he must instead rethink the meaning that the world has attributed to his name, and what that meaning has set in motion: the rotation of the world itself is Promethean, but it is so according to a certain predatory interpretation.
Act VIII – technical extensions of intentions
Prometheus understands that his retrograde motion is a symptom. Prometheus, a computational subject who desires negentropically and statistically, makes this reversal of motion a strength to re-engage with his desire with a new awareness. He must reverse his course by exploiting the oscillations of the rope, making the retrograde metaphorical: moving backward by moving forward, proposing a reversal of the dominant idea of progress through an action that exploits contemporary semi-technical flows. Every tool is re-signified to be not an extension of organic, muscular, or cognitive human capabilities, but rather a technical extension of an intention.
At this point, Retrograde Prometheus reconnects with the socio-technical fabric of the world with a strange sense of calm. For Retrograde Prometheus, digital and technology assume their full function only to the extent that they have the purpose of flowing organically, that is, when they lead to a transcendence that arrives in the physical and social space of concrete life. Retrograde Prometheus comes from the sea of cosmic nothingness; he is nobody. He is not a hacker; he uses the technologies available to him, the same ones that convinced him that progress was a practice of destruction, cowardice, and predation of others, the same ones that convince so many unsuspecting people. Retrograde Prometheus does not want to make technologies better because he knows he cannot reprogram them. Technologies will remain deeply disturbed and disturbing. Prometheus understands that it is futile to think of a plan to control the means of production, and that instead the method could be to re-functionalize the tools of these means for one's own and collective benefit.
Act IX – beings without stars, diviners of constellations
Derived from Latin, the term desire literally means without stars (de-siderio). In ancient Roman times, haruspices used to divine the stars. When the sky was overcast, however, predicting and anticipating the future became impossible, and this burning expectation of the future created the temporal condition of de-siderio, the condition of absence of stars. Even etymologically, desire is therefore essentially negentropic and statistical, Promethean. The priests of yesterday sought predictive data in the stars. In a deeper and more substantial sense, this drive did not tend to fill an original void prior to the subject, but rather a posterior void, a void of future to be filled with the divination of the stars.
Act X –∃ t t∈ [0,T), T<∞1
Retrograde Prometheus: You made me sway by telling me to run, you told me I would find salvation on the other side of the rope. Lies! Tyrants of hypocrisy, on the other side there is only Atropos mocking me with the other Fates, waiting to cut my rope. And what will become of all this muscular effort? All this effort, so fast and obsessive, what will remain if you betray me and throw me down? Who are you to demand my breath! Who are you to steal my breath!
The rope becomes increasingly taut. Prometheus steps back, reconnecting with the inescapable physics to which the rope responds, ignoring all the advice whispered by persuasive voices, masters and complicit slaves.
What calculations did you suggest I make? I just wanted to live, find my balance, sometimes explode, but only for fun.
What have you put into my head?! What numbers have you given me, what statistics, what rankings and games have you created so that I would lose while trying to win? From now on, I will be cunning, I will certainly use numbers, your techniques, your tools, yes, because I am not stupid and I will not fight you by picking up a torch again! Yes, I will use all your tricks, but to screw you over! I can't change the physics of the rope, but I can ignore you, even if it means tearing my ears off with my bare hands, screaming in your faces that you disgust me, a visceral disgust. I'll screw you with your own tools, I'll organize myself to do it, but you will never be the priority, you who are just the empty center of the asshole I'm going to penetrate. Time will tell, time is on my side! Fuck you, I'll do it with your tools, but the priority will be me and my balance. I spit on this rope, and you Fates... Atropos, especially you, here... I will only be happy with my work if it brings me to you with a big smile and few regrets.
……………. And if I don't make it?
On the rope, one hopes, on the rope, one achieves, on the rope, one fails and perishes. One might as well have fire in one's eyes, hold life in one's hands so that it does not escape. Freeze when the heart turns to stone, use that fire for the heartbeat, for a life that hopes to truly live.