As he is now

I saw a sculpture show at the Met Breuer last week: in essence, how presentations of the human form have changed over time, and how our perceptions have changed as well. Right at the opening of the exhibit, you’re confronted with classical statuary, all pale vanity and perfection.

How shocking, then, to turn the corner and be confronted with… color. (Heavens!) But that’s the point: applying color to these forms in a gesture toward reality turned them vulgar. By removing abstraction, by coloring in the lines, they were brought down to our plane. They were smaller, less powerful. The polychromatic minimizing of myth.

So what gives these statues power, then? I think it’s the ideal more than the image — the blankness of it allows us to impart something of ourselves into what we see. We imagine more with the outlines of something than when constrained by the reality of it. The marionette who seems more lifelike than a hyper-realistic figure: the latter so real we see its inanimacy, the former energized by the promise of movement, our own memory of what has come before. 

I think of “Rawhide,” a deeply evocative piece in which we see — clearly, perfectly — a human figure on all fours covered by a loose skin. But then we look within the rawhide shape and realize there’s nothing actually there. The rawhide is just a hard shell floating above empty space, evocative and reminiscent of something that doesn’t exist, at least not anymore. We see the after-effect of a body, the implication of it, but not the body itself.

And that’s the power of this piece, isn’t it, that we see more than is actually there. Our brains took mere outline, mixed it with experience and imagination, and suddenly this figure is more than the reality before us.

This sense of reality is transfixing for me right now as I sit with my grandfather and watch him wither. This morning, for the first time, he did not know me. Just for a moment, but in those minutes he did not see the world or understand it. With some breakfast and rest, he was better.

However, as he remembered who I was, I found myself remembering who he was. I found myself seeing the person he had once been — the ideal, the perfection, the movement, the joy — and not the reality in front of me.

It is hard to engage him as he is now. Part of this is his cognitive limitations, which he himself acknowledges. Part of it is his weariness — last night, when he was strong in mind, one of his first sentences to me after the welcomes and embraces was “I am tired of being healthy.” As in: the magnitude of work it takes to remain healthy (appointments, pills, sleep masks, more appointments…) is exhausting, and perhaps more than it’s worth, at least in his mind. This is a hard thing to support someone through.

But part of my difficulty is also that I must overcome my own sense of who he is meant to be and adapt to who he actually is. To see the coloring of his current being, the realism of a life sitting before me. He misses the old version of himself, and so do I. But he must deal with himself as he is now — I suppose I must learn to do the same.