The world hurtles past outside the train window, a mild landscape of trees and fields and creeks interrupted by small towns. An enormous egg whizzes by so fast I can just make out the words “World’s Largest Egg” on the platform it rests on. Every one of these towns has its history, every street and every building. People live and go about their business and die here. People had an idea for that egg, planned and built it and no doubt held some sort of ceremony to christen it. I feel overwhelmed by it all. Even every rotting log lying in a ditch beside the tracks has its own story, of the tree it once was, of how that tree died and was transformed into a home for generation upon generation of insects and microbes who spent their lives working hard to break the log down to return it to the soil it sprang from.
I’m on my way to Seattle to go to the art museums. I love the train but I don’t take it often, as it’s twice the price of the bus. But this is my last jaunt before summer officially ends, and I feel entitled to splurge.
A guy a few seats ahead of me can’t stop talking loudly and excitedly. He enthuses about how much he loves Ziploc baggies, screams in disbelief that his traveling companion, who has just professed her love of romantic comedies, has never seen the film “Definitely Maybe.” He tries to restrain himself but he just can’t believe it. I can see his left arm as he waves and flutters his hand as he jabbers on. He wears an enormous digital watch.
We pass through Centralia, a mecca for vine covered cars and abandoned easy chairs and backyard fences covered in lackluster graffiti. “Sara Raye Vanhausen” is spray painted on the back of an auto parts store. I wonder who she was, and what she did to become thus immortalized. The bedraggled outskirts suddenly give way to a charming downtown filled with shops and eateries and a bustling farmers market, before swiftly turning back into a testament of neglect.
We arrive in Seattle 25 minutes late but I’m not in any hurry so I stroll leisurely through Pioneer Square, gradually making my way up 1st Street, towards the art museum. It’s a beautiful afternoon, and the streets are filled with people who seem to be either homeless people or tourists, which are homeless in their way. I have lunch across the street from the museum at a place called Von’s 1000 Spirits, which looks touristy but turns out to be really good, with a srver who calls me darlin'.
I get into the museum for free with my employee badge and head up the escalators to see the big Giacometti retrospective. I saw a big show of his at the Modern exactly 20 years ago, and while he’s not an artist I think about much, I’ve gone months without seeing any art outside of where I work, and I’m hungry for it.
The show proves to be incredibly nourishing. Many of the smaller pieces are arranged on large tables. The dark, rough busts and figures rise from the white tabletops like stones in a Zen garden. I’m reminded of how limited his repertoire was; for the most part, he only stuck to a few images, repeating them over and over again. While part of me thinks of this as a lack of vision, as I get deeper into the show it feels more like a beautiful quest to uncover some essential truth about human nature. I can feel his need to try to expose the soul- sometimes lonely and brittle, sometimes solid and monumental, but always rough and lumpy, whittled away and built back up one globule of clay at a time. I feel deeply moved by the results of his beautiful, quixotic undertaking. Is this what the soul looks like, when you strip everything else away?
My day is altogether splendid. I fill myself with art and rest awhile and stuff myself with more, until finally I feel fat as a tick and need to stop before I pop. I wander around downtown some more then catch the train home. The setting sun is red and the sky is a strange orange-gray as the smoke from distant forest fires starts to blow in.
But when I arrive back in Portland, the night sky is clear and the moon is rising, clear and white and nearly full. I consider walking home from the station but decide to wait for the light rail. It’s a gorgeous Friday night and there are a lot of people downtown, mostly couples; guys in suits, women in heels. I see a man in a hooded sweatshirt and shorts standing completely still as a blond woman in a long, flowery dress touches his arms, then his shoulders,, then puts her arms around him and presses her head against his chest. He just stands there stiffly, never taking his hands out of his pockets.
A young man sits with his head beneath his knees. Nearby another does the same. People walk confidently in front of cars, scooters zip the wrong way along the streets. I step onto the train along with a couple wearing brand new punk outfits. They weren't even born yet when Green Day was big, much less the Sex Pistols. The spikes on his leather jacket are shiny, and her pink hair looks freshly dyed. She wears hot pants with the Misfits logo professionally printed across them. He keeps touching his slicked-back hair.
In the corner of the car, a woman squats in a nest of copies of the Asian Reporter, whose front page declares "Sick dolphin calf improves with tube-fed milk, helping hands." Across from her sits a person, possibly a man, with a brown puffy jacket pulled up over his head. His pants and sneakers are so heavily caked in wet mud I can only assume he just came from wading in the river. I think of Giacometti's lonely warriors striding across the wasteland, elegant and dignified in their isolation. They may personify existential angst and the capacity for human suffering, but this is not like that. The headless figure on the train more closely resembles another artist’s paintings I saw at the museum, Francis Bacon, whose smeared, twisted figures look like they are in the process of turning themselves inside out. The person inside the jacket twitches occasionally with a violent, jerking spasm, a chrysalis about to split and allow the being inside to burst free and spread its crumpled wings.
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