I write this note as a reflection on John Berger’s essay on Giacometti. I chanced upon this essay in his book ‘On Looking’. What follows are mostly thoughts by Berger, but I often find that by trying to understand words, we transform them and hence these reflections are at least a rearrangement of Berger’s thoughts if not their transformation.

It might be considered a sign of artistic maturity when the artist begins to think of his body of work. It is the birth of a perspective that ties the many fragments of his creation into a cohesive whole. And in this awareness of a theme the artist might seek a completion to the body of work. In this sense Berger says, “It is as though his death confirms his work: as though one could now arrange his works in a line leading to his death.”  Giacometti construed a body of work whose essential completion would be the artist’s death. This gave his works, while he was alive, the quality if being a preparation for what the future held. And to Giacometti the only irrefutable promise his future made was his mortality. What makes an artist think about life with the perspective supplied by his mortality? Berger offers a suggestion: “he simply could not in all honesty overcome his conviction that he had always been and would always be totally alone.” What has this loneliness to do with the sense of death? How does from it spring the theme which only death completes? The loneliness that Giacometti experienced originated from the proposition that reality could never be shared. This very private quality of an artist’s reality supplies him with that sense of isolation which nurtures an everlasting awareness of death. Under the inescapable canopy of isolation, the star of death shines ever so brightly. Once this is realized, death becomes the origin and the culmination of everything that one creates. Berger says, “This is why the content of any work is the incomplete history of his (Giacometti’s) staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him, it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute.”  Giacometti’s works shone with an incompleteness only death could erase.

Berger attempts to explain what brings this extraordinary sense of loneliness among some individuals. He says it is the result of a certain temperament which Giacometti shared with Samuel Beckett. “If a man was purely animal and not a social being, all old men would have the expression of Giacometti”. Here I know exactly what Berger wants to say, because I know of another man with the same expression, Manik Ghodghate, a poet of the Marathi language. Ghodghate’s poems give us the impression that they have been written in an eternal evening which the poet inherited at birth. The quality of fatigue on the face of Ghodghate and Giacometti is that of an unavoidable inheritance of solitude. In this sense both the sculptor and the poet lived in an evening that longed for a final nocturnal completion.