An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [89]
There was a Van de Graaff generator; you could make a bright crack of lightning strike it from a rod. From a vaulted ceiling hung a cracked wooden skiff—the soul boat of Sesostris III, which Carnegie had picked up in Egypt. Upstairs there were stuffed songbirds in drawers, and empty, faded birdskins in drawers, drab as old handkerchiefs. There were the world’s insects on pins and needles; their legs hung down, utterly dead. There were big glass cases you could walk around, in which various motionless American Indians made baskets, started fires, embroidered moccasins, painted pots, chipped spearheads, carried papooses, smoked pipes, drew bows, and skinned rabbits, all of them wearing soft and pale doeskin clothing. The Indians looked stern, even the children, and had bright-red skin. I never thought to draw them; they weren’t sculptures.
Sometimes I climbed the broad marble stairs to the art gallery. Carnegie’s plans for the art gallery had gone somewhat awry—gang agley—because its first curator was a Scotch-Irish Pittsburgher whose rearing had made it painful for him to spend money. He rarely acquired anything that cost over twenty-five dollars, and liked to buy wee drawings, almost any drawings, in bargain batches, “2 for $10” “3 for $20.” By my day, things had improved enormously, and the gallery would buy even large Abstract Expressionist canvases if the artists were guaranteed famous enough. Our school hauled us off to the art gallery once a year for the International Exhibition, but I rarely visited it on my Saturdays in the building, except when Man Walking was there.
Carnegie set up the International Exhibition in 1896 to bring contemporary art from all over the world each year to the art museum. Artists competed for a prize, and the museum’s curators could buy what they liked, if they felt they could afford it, or if they liked any of it. In 1961, Giacometti’s sculpture Man Walking won the International. I was sixteen. Everything I knew outside the museum was alien to me, then and for the next few years until I left home.
I saw the sculpture: a wiry, thin person, long legs in full stride, thrust his small, mute head forward into the empty air. Six feet tall, bronze. I read about the sculpture every time I opened the paper; I saw its picture; I climbed the marble stairs alone to look at it again and again. To see Man Walking, I walked past abstract canvases by Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Adolph Gottlieb…. I stopped and looked at their paintings. At school I began to draw abstract forms in rectangles and squares. But more often, then and for many years, I drew what I thought of as the perfect person, whose form matched his inner life, and whose name was, Indian style, Man Walking.
I saw a stilled figure in a swirl of invisible motion. I saw a touchy man moving through a still void. Here was the thinker in the world—but there was no world, only the abyss through which he walked. Man Walking was pure consciousness made poignant: a soul without a culture, absolutely alone, without even a time, without people, speech, books, tools, work, or even clothes. He knew he was walking, here. He knew he was feeling himself walk; he knew he was walking fast and thinking slowly, not forming conclusions, not looking for anything. He himself was barely there. He was in spirit and in form a dissected nerve. He looked freshly made of clay by God, visibly pinched by sure fingertips. He looked like Adam depressed, as if there were no world. He looked like Ahasuerus, condemned to wander without hope. His blind gaze faced the vanishing point.
Man Walking was so skinny his inner life was his outer life; it had nowhere else to go. The point where his head met his spine was the point where spirit met matter. The sculptor’s soul floated to his fingertips; I met him there, on Man Walking’s skin.
I drew Man Walking in his normal stalking pose and, later, dancing with his arms in the air. What if I fell in love with a man, and he took off