There was once a king who could not stop talking.
He spoke at his councils and at his feasts, at his wars and at his prayers. He answered questions before they were asked, and when anyone tried to tell him something he did not already know, he spoke louder. In the end the land grew tired of him. The rivers stopped flowing past his walls. The birds left his gardens. And one morning his servants found that the king had turned to stone, from the crown down, as if the world had decided to give him the only thing he had never had: silence.
He sits there still. His face is made of broken rock, each shard set against the next. His crown is a ring of standing stones. His shoulders have grown into the slabs of the mountain. Only two small red points of light remain where his eyes were, and around him tiger lilies grow wild, fire-orange and spotted with black, curling back on themselves like the speeches he never stopped giving.
Travellers come to look at him. Most of them speak first. They tell him what they think of kings, of stone, of art. They leave having heard only themselves.
But now and then someone comes who stands before him in silence and waits. And to that one, the king finally speaks.
"Everyone should stand before a picture as before a sovereign, waiting to see whether it will speak to him, and what it will say. And as with a sovereign, he must not address it first, for then he would hear only himself."
Arthur Schopenhauer
The king's head is real: natural stone set by the artist, piece by piece, over a plaster form. It still exists, and can stand on a plinth beside its own portrait.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in 2022.)
