According to legend, it was a rose which foretold Rainer Maria Rilke’s death.

Officially diagnosed as leukemia, Rilke’s fatal illness allegedly announced its arrival when he picked a rose for his visitor Nimet Eloui. After a thorn-prick failed to stop bleeding, Rilke’s infection passed from one swollen arm to the other as ulcerous sores overtook his body. The poet wasted away, finally succumbing to his sickness on December 29th, 1926, two years shy of a century today.

While the fittingly romantic metaphor of death-by-rose has since been debunked (Rilke biographer Ralph Freedman dates the flower-picking episode a year earlier), roses still loom over the poet’s grave, in the form of his epitaph:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern.

Rose, o pure contradiction, desire
to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids.

Rilke slept with roses his entire life. At the turn of the century he stayed at the Worpswede artists’ colony, in the bog country near Bremen, where he met both the Expressionist painter Paula Becker and his own future wife Clara Westhoff. “I invented a new form of caress,” he declared one Sunday, “placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt; only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.” Seven years later, the poet would pen “The Bowl of Roses,” opening with burning, passionate images of violence:

You’ve witnessed anger flaring; seen two boys
who’ve balled their bodies up, becoming something
that was hatred, thrashing on the earth
like animals who’ve been attacked by bees —
exaggerating, over-acting players;
careening horses breaking down, collapsing,
eyeballs rolling as they bare their teeth
as if to peel their skulls straight through their muzzles.

Flashing anger, swarms of bees, runaway horses, faces peeled away; Rilke assembles a vocabulary of fear and force to open his ode to flowers. Since the year before, Rilke’s current and former publishers have been locked in a war over the rights to print his work. It couldn’t come at a worse time for the poet, who finds himself once again broke, having already plowed through the most recent round of funding given to him by his friend and patron Karl von der Heydt by staying in expensive hotels, relying on porters and maids as he travels Europe by train.

But now you know how that may be forgotten:
before you stands a bowl that’s filled with roses.

It cannot be forgotten — wholly filled
with being and with bowing’s uttermost;
offering that cannot ever give;
stasis that might be ours — our utmost, too.

Rilke first met Rodin in 1902; three years later the poet would take up a position as the sculptor’s secretary, a position frequently occupied by men of letters, including the French critic Gustave Coquiot and later the English art critic-cum-eugenicist Anthony Ludovici, though Rilke’s tenure lasted only seven months, ending in April of 1906 when he wrote a letter to one of Rodin’s colleagues without permission.

Still life. An endlessly expanding-outward,
needing space, but never taking space
from space that things surrounding it diminish.

Late in Ludovici’s Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin the author rhetorically asks what sculpture is, a simple, essential question with — at least in Ludovici’s eyes — a simple, essential answer: “the production of a form by peripheral processes alone.” Ludovici declares the artifice of sculpture “the converse of Nature’s method”:

A man is a conglomeration of cells that have grown and pushed the air aside from an inner necessity. A sculpture of a man, however, is an object which has acquired shape from the outside, from surface treatment, as if by corrugations of its periphery. The natural form retains until the last the signs that it has grown outwards from inner necessity. Is it possible that sculpture, as representing the converse of the natural mode of formation, will also bear until the last the stamp of having grown from no inner necessity, but of having been pinched into existence, so to speak, from the outside?

And only barely limned, as if recessed;
all purely inward, laced with tenderness,
and self-illuminating to the edge.

Do we know anything that’s quite like this?

And then, like this: that such a feeling comes
from flower petals touching flower petals?

And this: that one should open like an eyelid,
while underneath lie only further eyelids
shuttered tight, as if through ten-fold sleep
they had to tamp in place some inner vision.

And this above all else: that through these petals,
the light must pass. That from a thousand skies,
they slowly filter out that drop of darkness
in whose fiery glow the tangled bunch
of stamens stirs, and rises up erect.

In the rose, Rilke finds himself absolved of his troubles with publishers and banks and employers. “There is no doubt that roses cast a spell upon Rilke,” writes E. M. Butler in his 1941 biography of the poet, the first to appear in English.

Monique Saint-Hélier recounts how he once sent her some fading flowers to die [in her company], because he was going away. His description of a vase of falling roses in Late Poems represents him as keeping them in his room until they were really dead, when he embalmed their petals in books and used them for pot-pourri. Rilke’s roses were always explicitly in enclosed spaces: in death-bed chambers, in his study at night, in rose-bowls, bringing summer into a room, bestrewing the chimney-piece as they shed their petals. And even in his garden at Muzot, they seemed to be clad in pink silk boudoir-gowns and red summer dresses, like carefully tended and cherished, fragrant and fragile hothouse blooms.

And that movement in these roses: see
the gestures from such miniscule deflections
that they’d stay unseen did not their rays
soon run apart, into the universe.

Another poetic legend tells of the wandering Rilke spending the offseason at the Castle Duino at the behest of the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe. The unforgiving climate tests the spirit of even our severe poet, yet within the empty castle’s sterility Rilke finds the inspiration to accede to the spirit of working, composing his Duino Elegies. Alone in the remote castle, Rilke asks, “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?”

In 1999 Rainer Schulte told the American Literary Translators Association Conference in New York that no matter how often we tried, Americans were going to keep reworking Rilke’s poetry until “we finally get it right.” Let’s take a minute to ask what Rilke is asking:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?	Leishman (1939/1960)
Who, if I cried out, would heed me amid the host of the Angels?	Behn (1957)
Who, if I shouted, among the hierarchy of angels would hear me?	MacIntyre (1961)
Who, if I cried, would hear me from the order of Angels?	Garmey/Wilson (1972)
Who of the angelic hosts would hear me, even if I cried out?	Boney (1975)
And if I cried, who’d listen to me in those angelic orders?	Poulin (1977)
If I cried out who would hear me up there among the angelic orders?	Young (1978)
What angel, if I cried out, would hear me?	Miranda (1981)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?	both Mitchell (1982) and Flemming (1985)
Who, though I cry aloud, would hear me in the angel order?	Hunter (1987)
WHO, if I cried out, might hear me — among the ranked Angels?	Cohn (1989)
If I did cry out, who would hear me through the Angel Orders?	Hammer/Jaegger (1991)
Who, if I cried out, would hear me then, out of the orders of angels?	Oswald (1992)
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions of Angels?	William H. Gass (1998)

Crying, shouting, crying out to the orders, hosts, hierarchies, dominions, who do not hear, heed or listen. The final take above comes from Gass’s Reading Rilke, his half-biography, half-“transreading” of the poet he calls as close to him “as any human being has ever been.” Gass’s intimate identification with Rilke makes for the thorniest and most intriguing parts of his book. In looking at this passage, Gass expands that perspective even wider:

…it is not the fastidious, fussy little person of the petitioner who wonders these words (it is everybody’s elemental outcry); and although addressed to the Angels, it is as if the Angels spoke them, because their meaning is not common, small, or mean — earthbound — as most of our fears and worries are, most of our thoughts, hopelessly human as we are; hence the poem which appears like the wind in our ear must have all the fundamental mystery and breathtaking grandeur we feel whenever we encounter that simple, plain, and pure correctness about the nature of things which only the gods possess.

Rodin told Ludovici “the radical problem of all good sculpture consisted in discovering how an object moulded from the outside could be made to look as if it had grown from an inner necessity. In other words, it consisted in so manipulating the medium of expression as the produce by art a form that seemed to be created by natural laws.” At least in Gass’s view, Rilke succeeded:

…the voice, of course, is not heard as the poet’s own. It comes from the clean wind, the bora, burning his face like the sun, and it has the same elemental force, the same cold grip, as the streaming air which would lift him like a leaf and whirl him away over the glare of the sea.

“These are not poems, then,” Gass concludes. “These are miracles. And they must seem miraculous… Ein Gott vermags.”

To Marjorie Perloff, Gass’s is “a surprising conclusion […] for a postmodern philosopher, critic, and novelist, known for his insistence that the language of poetry (or fiction), far from representing any social or moral reality outside itself, creates its own universe.” For Perloff, a native speaker of German, “Gass’s explanations are primarily frustrating, in that none of the above translations, Gass’s included, give the reader who knows no German any real sense of Rilke’s peculiar power.” Perloff contrasts Rilke with other German poets, highlighting his “high degree of untranslatability.” His distended Latinate sentences, haunted by hypotactic clauses built of abstract metaphors, seem almost designed to inspire conflicting images and interpretations. How, she asks, “can the English translator reproduce the syntactic suspension, heightened by the explosive sound repetition of ‘Wér, wénn ich schríee…’?” Look for example at Christopher Middleton’s take on Trakl’s “Geburt,” whose concrete images give the translator a relative foothold compared to Rilke’s strange abysses:

Gebirge: Schwärze, Schweigen und Schnee	Mountains: blackness, silence and snow,
Rot vom Wald niedersteigt die Jagd;	Red from the forest the hunt comes down;
O, die moosigen Blicke des Wilds.	O the mossy gaze of the wild deer.

Next to Rilke, even Trakl’s Expressionist lyricism offers a tidy interpretation. Rilke’s own poetics are emblematic of the sudden shift from Romanticism to Modernism. So how can we ever “get it right” in Rainer Schulte’s eyes? What does getting it right in this context even mean?

Let’s shift gears. Take a look at Rodin’s Les Bourgeois des Calais.

Commissioned to commemorate the surrender to the English of the French port of Calais during the Hundred Years’ War, Rodin’s sculpture was decried by the public from the outset for its lack of obvious heroic referents. Far from Herculean, Rodin’s figure of Eustache de Saint Pierre appears instead to be melting, his lugubrious form broken under the weight of defeat. Rodin depicts the moment Saint Pierre and the other burghers surrender their city, which has been driven to starvation by England’s Edward III after his victory at Crécy. Rodin insisted his statue captured heroism — the heroism of self-sacrifice.

When Rodin’s piece was first installed in 1895, it was placed on a large pedestal overlooking the Parc Richelieu. Perhaps the figure of Romantic valor for which the citizenry had hoped might have been at home in such a position. But Rodin insisted the public should “almost bump into” his figures to inspire solidarity with their sacrifice. (The sculpture today resides on a much lower base outside the town hall of Calais.)

Like Rodin, Alberto Giacometti began his life as an artist by copying what he saw. Ludovici writes that Rodin initially “despised this work and regarded it as a rather shameful prostitution of his gifts, but in time he came to think differently of it and ultimately believed that as much beauty could lie in ornament as in the human figure.” According to Jacques Dupin, Giacometti copied in order

to give consistency to the reality which eludes him, to see it, hold on to it, and hence to affirm himself in its presence. And as he copies it he advances toward the most exact portrayal of what he sees, but also toward awareness of the absolute impossibility of this attempt. The affective ordeal becomes identified with his experience of the perception which objectifies the inner drama. His procedure turns into a stubborn, furious pursuit of a prey which escapes him or of a shadow which he rejects. The closer he comes to the truth of the object, the more he deepens the gulf which separates him from it, the more he feels and communicates the acute feelings of his difference and his separation.

By the time Giacometti arrived in Paris in 1922, Rodin had been dead for five years. Maybe it’s fitting for an artist who devoted his entire life to the exploration of solitude, probing its depths and finding only the vast abyss of incommunicability. “No matter how near he may be,” writes Dupin, “how affectionate, how understanding, that other person can do nothing for me and I can do nothing for him: we speak but do not hear each other; we touch without knowing each other.”

Giacometti’s lifelong model was his brother Diego, whose likeness Alberto sculpted and painted countless times across his life. Yet despite constant iteration, Alberto never appears to get used to his brother’s face. From afar his head shrinks into the void, almost disappearing entirely; up close it looms like a planet over a spindly body. Alberto’s eye can never settle on his brother’s face, and his discomfort in assigning it a fixed form manifests in dozens, hundreds of heads, eventually leading the sculptor to give up on the rest of the body altogether. “Nothing was as I imagined it,” he would write. “A head — I dropped the figure quite soon; it was too much — became for me a totally unknown object without dimensions. Twice a year I would begin two heads, always the same ones, without finishing them, and I put my studies aside.” One day André Breton visits Giacometti at his studio, only to find the sculptor caught in a Sisyphean quest to recreate his brother’s visage. Breton can hardly contain his outrage at Giacometti’s inability to break from the physical world into the dreamspace the Surrealists embraced. “We know what a head is,” Breton declares in frustration and disappointment.

Do we?

“We cannot know his legendary head / with eyes like ripening fruit,” wrote Rilke, according to Stephen Mitchell. Or maybe those eyes were more specifically like an apple, if you asked Sarah Stutt or Carl Skoggard, who in turn call that “legendary head” either “incredible” or “unexampled,” respectively. “Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, / darin die Augenäpfel reiften,” goes Rilke’s original.

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

According to another poetic legend, Rilke wrote his “Archaic Torso of Apollo” upon encountering a broken Greek statuary in the Louvre, or perhaps in Rodin’s studio. The image of the God of Light, Music and Poetry shattered into fragments imparted a deep impression on the poet. Somewhere in the marble lurked a force greater than mere matter, a force which saw Rilke in turn and made its own demands immediately clear. “Du mußt dein Leben ändern,” ends Rilke’s sonnet. You must change your life.

Rilke’s command from the stone has been adopted more than once as a kind of self-help koan. “One can almost hear Rodin’s voice speaking through the stone,” writes Rachel Corbett in her book simply titled You Must Change Your Life, “like the oracle to which Rilke had once asked the almighty question, ‘How should I live?’” Corbett offers no instruction in the matter. But in his own book of the same title from 2009, Peter Sloterdijk does. Sloteridjk reads in the statue’s injunction a call to self-improvement:

‘You must change your life!’ – this is the imperative that exceeds the options of hypothetical and categorical. It is the absolute imperative – the quintessential metanoetic command. It provides the keyword for revolution in the second person singular. It defines life as a slope from its higher to its lower forms. I am already living, but something is telling me with unchallengeable authority: you are not living properly.

Submission to the ethical imperative requires submission to a metamorphosis of self-discipline, of self-overcoming. Sloteridjk’s philosophical idol Nietzsche called man the mangled being, but for Sloterdijk man is the creature of excesses — excessive desires and excessive demands — but above all, the animal that demands of itself the improbable (443). Thus human nature leads us to be “superior to themselves, and carry within themselves an asymmetry in which they mould and are moulded.” (328) This structural condition reveals what Sloterdijk calls, appropriating Helmuth Plessner’s language, an “eccentric potential in humans.”

This authority touches on a subtle insufficiency within me that is older and freer than sin; it is my innermost not-yet. In my most conscious moment, I am affected by the absolute objection to my status quo: my change is the one thing that is necessary. If you do indeed subsequently change your life, what you are doing is no different from what you desire with your whole will as soon as you feel how a vertical tension that is valid for you unhinges your life.

For Sloterdijk, the history of human society constitutes the evolution of what he terms “anthropotechnics”: the reinterpretation of human nature as an intentionally malleable object. Sloterdijk defines modernity as “the time in which those humans who hear the call to change no longer know where they should start: with the world or with themselves — or with both at once.” Sloterdijk’s programme argues religion has never existed except as a manifestation of what he terms the “practicing human,” a category which includes yogis, farmers, artists, teachers, monks, writers, and any other person who performs an act out of habit, schedule or discipline. If the category sounds broad, it is; for 500 pages Sloterdijk gives himself free rein to rope in subjects from Kafka to Scientology. Sloterdijk’s thought process is fascinating to watch unfold in real time, but while his discursive rambling makes for clever aphorisms, his larger arguments fail to take shape as he falls somewhere in line with the Reformers of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic as they try to drag ascetic religion “out of monastic cells and into everyday life.” More often than not his calls to change your life feel like a motivational speaker’s take on Will Durant’s dictum from The Story of Philosophy: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Under the broad heading of “doing,” Sloterdijk corrals all manner of thinking, speaking, acting, feeling and communicating. (Again one recalls another thinker, the therapist Paul Watzlawick, who famously decreed “One cannot not communicate.” Perhaps Sloterdijk must remind himself one cannot not do.)

Moreover, as an artist like Giacometti makes abundantly clear, to see reality is to open one’s eyes to the world as if it just emerged for the first time, to invent a new gaze every time one sees, free from the conventions substituting concept for sensation and knowledge for seeing. For Giacometti, the only repetition which makes way for the purification of the gaze is the cyclical repetition of violent confrontation with reality, an uncertain, incessant struggle of passions which reinforces their essential remoteness and alterity.

But a larger blind spot occludes Sloterdijk’s vision. Even if we accept as a given his argument for an irreligious spirituality of “practice,” Sloterdijk’s worldview leaves no room for the Dionysian side of spirituality and transcendence, for the philosophy of willful abandon which gives rise to the Hellenestic cults of the bacchantes, a philosophy which gives no reverence to form or discipline, grasping instead for transcendence at any price. And while it may be one viable pathway, practice is not a prerequisite for transcendence.

Let’s consider for a moment another torso whose head we can never know: namely, the 1998 fourth album by Boston sludge band Grief. Church is a scam — so is God, bellows guitarist Jeff Hayward on “Polluted.”

Polluted souls
Polluted minds
Polluted beings —
We’re called mankind

If Grief’s poetics don’t appear quite so sophisticated as Rilke’s, they manage to evoke another sentiment of Sloterdijk’s, this time from 2006’s Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation:

…the outrageous circumstances appear to be in no way less dramatic than the situation of the English working class in the nineteenth century according to Friedrich Engels’s daunting depiction. One is led to believe that the sum total of suffering, misery, and injustice on earth, which could potentially spark rage, would be enough for ten eruptions when compared to the situation in October 1917… In the East and in the West all that remains of the hopes of those who used to be revolutionaries, reformers, transformers of the world, and redeemers of classes are mere “petrifications” — to call up a bizarre phrase of Heiner Müller, bizarre because hopes usually wither, not petrify.

Abandoned by the useless system, why?
Tortured screams go unheard

Radicalism is only important in the Western Hemisphere as an aesthetic attitude, perhaps also as a philosophical habitus, but no longer as a political style.

“We have a notorious reputation for having fights at our shows, or things getting broken, or Jeff drinking too much and falling off the stage while playing, or whatever,” guitarist Terry Savastano told an interviewer shortly before the release of Torso. “That’s just the kind of band we are. And the people who listen to us, that’s the kind of people they are. It just works.”

Despite their violently radical content, Grief’s philosophy as advanced in their interviews and lyrics lacks the political cohesion which might elevate them to revolutionary status. Returning to Sloterdijk, “we are dealing with the same angry young men into whose double misery of unemployment and excess adrenaline the explosive insight into their social superfluity was added. It would be careless not to want to understand that they are potential recruits for any war, which provides them with a perspective for breaking out of the prison of their involuntary apathy.” And so Grief points to a void that Sloterdijk himself clearly delineates in Rage and Time, a void he seems to have forgotten by the time of You Must Change Your Life. Deprived of the outlet of revolution, rage withers into impotence and undirected violence. Sloterdijk decrees “at this moment, there are no forms of positive apocalypse whose popularization would be capable of translating the potential collapse of currently successful social and economic systems into attractive visions for the time to come.” And so the imaginal meta-discourses within heavy metal fixate on post-apocalyptic fantasies of violence and by extension point to the same void in society that Sloterdijk so lucidly describes. Jacques Attali reminds us in Noise: The Political Economy of Music that “living in the void means admitting the constant potential for revolution, music and death… Truly revolutionary music is not music which expresses the revolution in words, but which speaks of it as a lack.” The lack of a space for both revolution and the outlet of rage contributes to the discourses of rebellion and irreverence in heavy metal, as illustrated as much by Grief’s cavernous silences and achingly slow progressions as by bassist Jeff Hayward’s lyrics.

According to Attali,

In a society in which power is so abstract that it can no longer be seized, in which the worst threat people feel is solitude and not alienation, conformity to the norm becomes the pleasure of belonging, and the acceptance of powerlessness takes root in the comfort of repetition. The denunciation of “abnormal” people and their usage as innovators is then a necessary phase in the emplacement of repetition. Although training and confinement are the heralds of repetition, confinement is no longer necessary after people have been successfully taught to take pleasure in the norm… thus music today is in many respects the monotonous herald of death. Ever since there have been musical groups in places where labor consists in dying, death and music have been an indissociable pair.

In their episode discussing Rilke’s torso and Sloterdijk’s book, Weird Studies podcast hosts Phil Ford and J. F. Martel point to the power of the imaginal in the original sonnet, which devotes itself to imaging the statue’s missing head. Poetry and artistic culture are “tools for dreaming,” Ford and Martel point out, “for exploring the imaginal.”

“A great artist,” say Ford and Martel — and they could perhaps be speaking of Rilke or Rodin or Giacometti or Grief — “is able to so configure the work that even someone who has no idea where it came from or what inspired it can still feel the aura.” Martel calls this “the ability to perform the inner gesture, to reverse the perspective to being seen by an object.” There is no place which does not see you, Rilke writes. This is the talent for religion Weber denied having. The reality of the object’s gaze may not at first be obvious, but — as Sloterdijk would have it — with practice it becomes so.

Dupin declared

No artist of our time has interrogated reality with as much insistence, passion and amazement as Alberto Giacometti. Alone, against the current, he persisted in having models pose in the minuscule dusty studio where he worked for nearly forty years. Even during the period when he seemed to stray from his sole investigation, he still pursued it. In this pursuit, he burnt up his eyes and his life. In a moment by moment struggle, he devoted all his powers to it until they were exhausted, as if the meaning of his life, and the fate of Art, depended on a discovery which he judged to be at once ridiculous and impossible.

Writing under the workaholic Rodin, Rilke observed a master completely dedicated to making an ancient medium do new things at a time when it had seemingly been exhausted. Almost single-handedly, Rodin took his chosen medium to Promethean heights of subjective expression. Years later, Giacometti would devote himself even further to the pursuit of reality, of the totality of the real across fragments. “Each thing and each human being,” says Dupin, “untiringly questioned with that intensity that Giacometti puts into each gesture and each look, became the unknown, the pre-eminently unknown, and the object of an infinite approach, a renewed astonishment, an inexhaustible quest.” Sickly, introverted Rilke, watching Rodin work, fixates on a shattered fragment of a muscular Greek statue, transforming it into the unknown, the unknowable, his legendary head which commands the poet: you must change your life. Contra Spinoza’s painful passions or Nietzsche’s reactive state, Rilke recasts humility — the same nobility in defeat felt by Rodin’s Burghers of Calais — as the seed of creation. It’s the moment Sloterdijk’s practitioner searches for in a lifetime of anthropotechnic repetition, the kind of repetition which eventually cost Giacometti his life, and Rilke finds it immediately.

Assimilating the cubists’ poetics of space, Giacometti turns his gaze toward movement, translating interior conflicts into dynamic oppositions of form and volume. “The interior model has taken the place of concrete reality,” Dupin points out.

These mysterious objects whose symbolic function has not stopped exerting its fascination — unlike so many others of that genre which are very quickly defused — seem to carry the precise enigmas of depth in a dazzling light. Cruel instruments, emblematic figures, coagulations of desire, delicately set traps, obsessional circuits, fragile constructions visited by death: they possess the same exactness, the same intensity of confrontation between outside and inside, as the works executed according to nature.

Dupin could almost be describing the crude green figure in flames adorning Grief’s Torso, “still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp,” as Rilke wrote, “to that dark center where procreation flared.” Perhaps atop Grief and Rilke’s torsos we can imagine Giacometti’s scratched plaster “Head on a Rod,” tilted back on its display as if to audibly scream.

“I began to see heads in the void,” James Lord quotes Giacometti in his biography of the sculptor, “in the space which surrounds them.”

When for the first time I clearly perceived how a head I was looking at could become fixed, immobilized definitively in time, I trembled with terror as never before in my life and a cold sweat ran down my back. It was no longer a living head, but an object I was looking at like any other object, but no, differently, not like any other object, but like something simultaneously living and dead. I gave a cry of terror, as if I had just crossed a threshold, as if I was entering a world never seen before. All the living were dead, and that vision was often repeated…