|
transfinite joy |
"Girl with Squirrel" said the sign. For the second time I glanced at the statue, which now had a name. I began to study it. The most arresting part of the artwork was the subtle angularity of the Girl's body. Her feet were pulled up to her buttocks, her knees forming an acute angle that the artist refrained from softening. Her straight hair reached the base of her skull, accentuating the shape of her neck. I observed the figure's easy relationship with the rodent at her ankles; the boxish squirrel was nibbling a food chip which the Girl held in her fingertips.
The Girl felt like asphalt (I know this because I pressed my fingers against the girl's shoulder even though the sign said not to touch).
When I had first approached "Girl with Squirrel," I saw her mouth, ears, cheekbones, and other features on her face as separate things. Now, instead of analyzing the separate features, I tried to look at her face as a whole - as the thing that was there with me right then. It was in the middle of my open looking that I began to see an "I" in her. It was a distinct personality in front of me. Intrigued, and unable to turn to the next piece of artwork, I began to try to gather her character.
I placed my foot outside the small partition that separated us and leaned close to inspect her face. Her brows were pushed into her eyes, her checks unmoving; she was concentrating. I then paced to the right, back onto the sidewalk, and speculated speculated. Speculated. To what extent did the artist invest herself into the statue? Was the Girl's emotion a reflection of what the artist observed in the people living around him/her, or did it echo his/her own personal experience?
The statue's expression was a puddle of emotion, veiled only from the glances of passersby by the clay that made her.
I put several more paces between "Girl with Squirrel" and I, leaned from foot to foot, and started to play a childish question-and-answer game with myself. Question: What could have provoked the Girl's expression, which was (as I wordily described it afterwards) heavy, close-lipped, and mildly distressed? Answer: The girl was lonely and welcomed the rodent's company. Perhaps she missed a loved one. The squirrel distracted her from a troubled event in her life. Or, she was in her lawn and did not expect the society of this usually distrustful animal. I reached for the artist's vision, which seemed to elude me in clever dodges beneath the girl's ankles or in the bent of her arm.
The moment that passed before it happened was silent and empty; only quietude preluded the movement of her head. It turned towards me. Her eyes saw me and looked. For the first time I felt that it was unthinkable to regard this being as anything other than alive, and at once strove to hear her talk or see her stand up. I felt the warm complexity of a human spirit, impossible to classify, as I was just two seconds ago trying so hard to do. The fact that she was sitting on a pedestal, surrounded by statues, to be looked at by people like me who paid at the door, was absurd. I wanted her to breathe to prove herself.
Deftly she bent her head back to its original position and glazed her eyes over with clay.
Afterwards I walked around and around "Girl with Squirrel," studying every detail in hopes of catching the secret. Again and again, in spontaneous bursts like firecrackers, I felt the heat from the statue. But I could do nothing.
Later that day, after wandering around the premises, I went away. I carried a faint scorn for other sculptures with me. They were pretending to have, and only reaching for, the symbiotic relationship with reality that "Girl with Squirrel" had achieved.
-cat b.