STILL, LIFE

I. On December 27, 2006 two men jumped off to their deaths in the freezing waters of the Hudson River.

There is something about the cold weather that provides a pathological explanation to a man's desire to end his life in his own way and time - a certain chemical imbalance caused by the cold air weighing heavily on his fragile soul. A local newspaper article put further blame on the stress that the holiday season put so much on people in their yearning to purchase the perfect gift or to cook the perfect meal. (Unacceptable as it may seem, a lot of people die in all their efforts to please.)

One of these deaths particularly concerned me, the one involving a priest - a person trained to live in a world of loneliness and isolation. If depression can catch a trained spiritual counselor off-guard, what are we, ordinary mortals, expected of than to hold on to life's railings a little more tightly.

II. Man Pointing is a bronze sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (now on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, in 53rd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Manhattan) - a very thin and erect figure of a man whose outstretched right arm points to something, with the left arm curved into a gesture that is seemingly an invite to whatever is being pointed at.

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described the sculpture as "halfway between nothingness and being" due to the palpable slimness and outrageous elongation the figure appears to be, and yet, even from a distance, the viewer can easily be stunned by the imposing presence the sculpture makes by the manner in which it dominates its space.

Seeing this sculpture on December 28th, I begun to think of the boundary described by Sartre, and in effect made my own: the figure was halfway between death and rebirth. The pointing man, to me, is that of a dead man (a figure not dissimilar to the dead boy in Bruce Holland Rogers' short story Dead Boy At Your Window) in a state of resurrection.

III. Follow the logic: If art imitates life, and this is a lonely life, does that make art generally lonely?

Ron Mueck's sculptures currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art seem to affirm that. His ultra-realistic figures of men, women, and babies (cast in resin, I think) not only capture the "realness" of flesh, but in further artistic triumph caught the many moods of man in various stages of alienation. There was a figure of a new born baby, about half a foot long, hanging on a massive white wall that gives the impression of a crucified baby. And then there is a figure of a bearded man that is almost five times the size of an average American male, sitting on a chair, stark naked, but with a forlorn outlook that seemed ironic based on his size (he towered above the viewers and yet he seemed to be under their command) - which, once more, displays man's loneliness due to his failure to fit in.

IV. In his essay Against Joie de Vivre, Philip Lopate says he is attracted to depressed people because they seem to know something he does not.



**photo courtesy of MoMA.org