I am reading a book on the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) in an attempt to rouse up my language. He knew things I want to know and expressed things I want to say. With immense vision and skill he used metal, plaster, paint, and clay to create gaunt elongated human forms. When looking at these figures, we would prefer to think we were looking through a window to humans past then a mirror reflecting humans present. Giacometti’s figures ask us, What is being human? The whole answer, not just part.
As W. H. Auden wrote, “Art’s real subject is the human clay.” Poets use words to approach this clay, to see it, smell it, feel it. We humans are so very close to – – something. Yet we have made habit of missing that something. It is a bad habit. Worse than smoking, because we have come to normalize and not lament the damage this bad habit has done.