Before It Sets

What Pompeii, George Segal, and a gas station in Ottawa revealed about interruption, memory, and movement

Detail from George Segal’s Gas Station. Somewhere between the crate and the machine, I recognized the danger of staying still long enough for it to become identity.

I didn’t expect a gas station in Ottawa to take me back to Pompeii.

At fourteen, I walked through Pompeii with a teacher who taught me how to think. Not what to think.

The bodies there are dramatic, but not in any theatrical sense. They are interrupted.

The scene in Pompeii isn’t one unified emotional state. It’s a cross-section of human response. Panic and action. Protection and connection. Confusion. And in some cases, near-instant collapse.

What makes it powerful is not death itself, but the preservation of reaction. Each body caught mid-response — reaching, turning, shielding, folding — before anything can resolve.

What remains is not a single emotion, but a record of interruption.

I don’t see that scene when I remember it. I don’t see anything. That’s how my mind works. No images, no replay.

But that doesn’t make it vague.

If anything, it makes it exact.

What remains is the imprint. The knowing of what was there, without the distraction of trying to reconstruct it. No visual simulation. Just the structure of the experience.

Because of that, I don’t revisit the past as a scene. I revisit it as information. As pattern. I can look at it from where I stand now and ask what it means here, not what it looked like then.

For someone with aphantasia and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM), memory resolves, it doesn’t blur.

Stripped of imagery, stripped of embellishment, it offers a different kind of clarity. Less visually coloured, though not free from interpretation. More available for pattern recognition. It is precise in a way that lets me take something from the past and place it, deliberately, into the present.

Years later, in the National Gallery of Canada, I ran into the same structure wearing a different form.

George Segal. The Gas Station, 1963. 2 plaster figures, Coca-Cola machine, 71 glass bottles, 4 wooden crates, metal stand, 8 rubber tires, tire rack, 30 oil cans, electric clock, 6 concrete blocks, 2 windows of wood and plate glass, 2.59 x 7.32 x 1.22 m

George Segal built a gas station and removed its distractions. Two figures. A clock that refuses to explain anything. Crates. A Coca-Cola machine standing there, as if relief were something you could purchase on cue.

My eye went straight to the man on the right.

He’s seated. Folded forward. Holding a bottle like it might explain something.

He sits between the crate and the machine — between supply and consumption — and looks like someone who hasn’t decided if he’s resting or if he’s stopped.

Standing in front of him, the resemblance was hard to ignore. Not in circumstance, but in posture. One arrested in an instant. The other learning how to stay that way.

The last two years didn’t arrive one at a time. Burnout. A broken femur. Physical rehabilitation that asks for patience when you prefer momentum. Loss. Caregiving. Showing up for others while renegotiating your own structure. None of it exceptional on its own. Together, enough to change your pace.

What follows isn’t always collapse.

Sometimes you stay in place.

Everything around you continues. The system works. The machine takes coins. The crates empty. And you sit long enough that stillness starts to read as identity.

I tried to make the piece about time. The clock is right there. Past on one side, future on the other. It doesn’t hold. Nothing here moves.

Two people in the same system, making different agreements with it.

On the left, inside the booth, a man stacks oil cans into a small pyramid before placing them back into a linear order on the shelf. The gesture doesn’t escape the system. It passes through expression and returns to structure. A brief authorship, then compliance.

On the right, the seated man moves product from crate to machine — or pauses in the middle of that motion long enough that it’s unclear whether he’s working or reconsidering the work entirely.

That’s the difference.

Transformation versus transfer. Participation with intent versus participation by default.

There’s something else you wouldn’t see standing in the gallery.

When Segal first built this scene, it wasn’t stripped down. It was crowded with colour — advertising signs layered across the space, directing attention before you had a chance to form your own. After a trip to Europe, after time spent with work that didn’t need to announce itself, he removed it.

What’s left is not a more elegant gas station. It’s a more legible one.

He simplified it so it could be read.

And that’s not just an artistic decision. It’s a discipline most of us avoid.

We live inside accumulation. Another supplement. Another productivity framework. Another machine offering relief on demand, as if exhaustion were a purchasing problem instead of a structural one.

Segal went the other way.

He removed until the structure held on its own.

Subtraction asks something different. It asks you to trust that what remains is enough — and to confront what shows up when nothing else is there to soften it.

The Coca-Cola machine stays. It matters that it stays.

There was a time when Coca-Cola included cocaine in its early formulation. A stimulant, sold as promise.

And yet here, the promise doesn’t carry.

The man holding the bottle isn’t revived. Whatever the formula offers, it doesn’t resolve the posture.

Which is the point.

Relief that can be purchased on cue rarely addresses the structure that produced the need for relief in the first place.

Segal removed the noise so that contradiction would remain visible.

And once you see it, it’s difficult to ignore.

Around the same time, I came across Thomas Frey.

His use of the word inertia made me stop. Not because it was precise, but because it wasn’t. I know what the word means. I’ve heard it used differently — more accurately, more physically. That contrast forced a pause.

It interrupted my loyalty to the present — before it decided to keep me.

And in that break, something shifted. Not clarity, nor certainty.

Hope. The inconvenient kind — the kind that requires something of you.

Even staying still was taking me somewhere.

Shaped by what I did — and what I didn’t.

Then there’s Sadhguru, who doesn’t define it. In yoga, inertia is felt. It’s the weight in the body when you know you should move and don’t. It’s staying in a posture because it’s familiar.

You don’t think your way out of it. You move.

One shift. Then another. Enough to prove you haven’t hardened into place.

That’s where this lands for me.

Not as a rejection of the system. I work in one. I believe in them, most days. The question isn’t whether you’re inside. You are. The question is whether you’ve mistaken stillness for stability.

The seated man isn’t broken. He’s paused long enough that the pause risks becoming permanent.

I don’t want that.

I don’t need a new life. I need to re-enter this one properly.

A friend suggested the gallery. On the way out, he asked if I was going to write about it.

I hadn’t written in months.

For people like me — with aphantasia, with SDAM — experience doesn’t replay. It resolves. Without something to anchor it, it disappears as quickly as it arrives.

Art interrupts that.

It gives you something to stand in front of when you can’t stand inside your own memory. It holds the shape of a feeling long enough for you to work with it.

That’s why this matters beyond a gallery visit.

The arts are not decorative. They are functional. They give form to what we cannot easily hold, and in doing so, they help us decide what comes next.

I don’t need either of them to be perfectly right.

I can feel the difference now.

Between staying — and deciding not to.

This looks like writing again.