Giacometti Roddan

Last night I had an experience which must have been similar to the experience Giacometti had in Paris in Place d'Italie when he first experienced the sensation that he later claimed caused him to create the work he created. Not that my experience was the same experience, it couldn't have been, but it felt similar to the quality of the experience James Lord recounts in his Giacometti bio and that had such impact on Giacometti.

I was walking northwest on Union Street. It was perhaps 10 p.m. The shops were mostly closed though the restaurants and bars were open and there were people in them. There was enough light so that the people out walking made long shadows on the sidewalk.

Though I was with someone else I experienced the intensity of the sense that there was just me, and that I was all there is. It came out of nowhere for such a gigantic feeling, though that it came out of nowhere might have magnified its impact.

It wasn't as if I was alone, I wasn't, and yet it was as if I was the only person in the world, as if my aloneness was all there was to everything, that everything was measured from me and that the measurement extended out from me and was then returned to me in one and the same motion so that there was no inseperability from what I was seeing and what would become of what I saw.

I couldn't see anything beyond what I was seeing, and what I was seeing was all there was.

The experience of seeing this way stayed with me all the way home. When I woke this morning it's still here in everything I'm seeing.