enthusiasm is contagious

What does it mean to be alive? We toured the bedroom of a dead poet on the anniversary of her death. S. was excited that Emily Dickinson was so tiny, so short, and we spoke of the average height of the era, and the tour guide spoke of the size of Abraham Lincoln, and I talked about the chair the Connecticut Historical Society has that was made to allow Lincoln to travel comfortably on the train from CT to NY for his Cooper Union speech. The tour guide had seen some suit of Lincoln’s, then I talked about the divine wee-ness of MLK. A man who seems, in voice and action, larger than life, but in suit (I saw it in Atlanta) seems a diminutive gentleman. Anyway, this reminded me of the conversation I had in my head when I was at the Brooklyn Museum the weekend before, about how it seemed like the people who were most engaged in the whole place were the people who were looking at the clothing exhibit. I think there is something about clothing—how its shaped so specifically, how it calls out to hold a body—that makes people feel closer, somehow, to the history, or the item. This is too bad for Kiki Smith, and for Albert Bierstad, and for Judy Chicago, but it isn’t too bad for Lincoln, or Dickinson, or MLK. I think there is something in the imagining we do to place ourselves in their outfits that transcends the art, that creates a new space for imagination in the body, that makes people feel possibility in their hands and feet, not only in their heads.