Page 84 - Sorrow of the Earth: Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull and the Tragedy of Show Business

Dew”. He describes the master pieces of nature which carelessly deposits the

shapes of trees, ferns, coral and lace on our bedroom windows.

It’s said that he played the clarinet and imitated the sound of birds, turkeys
and frogs. This may be true. His imagination is indisputable, but people must
have made some of it up. He photographed the smile of young girls, but not
one of these photographs has survived. He noted down everything: the
weather, the clothes he wore, the day’s news items, how many litres of milk
his farm had sold, everything and nothing. For him, the smallest details had
their importance. But the essential part of his life was concentrated in his eyes.

Wilson existed entirely in his eyes, as if living consisted in seeing, looking, as
if he were haunted by the visible world, as if he were desperately searching
for something. But what? Nothing perhaps. Just the sense of time perishing,
forms failing.
As he grew older, he attempted the impossible: he wanted to photograph
the wind. But photography kills everything it captures, movement dies in its

slide holders. Even cinema can’t do it. You can only film the effects of wind,
not the wind itself. He tried. I’ve never seen his photographs of breeze and
blizzards; and I have no wish to see them. I can imagine them. A little later
on, he also photographed drops of dew. It’s said that he looked out for them in
the morning on the legs of grasshoppers.
He was an inveterate storyteller, stuck Chinese lanterns on the ceiling,
played croquet in the dining room and shared scraps of his whimsical, upbeat

philosophy with children. He loved the cinema. A fan of Mary Pickford, he
never missed a film of hers, and would play the organ during the interval.
When he fell in love with a schoolteacher, Mina Seeley, he was apparently
content just to scratch her initials on a windowpane with his finger. Which is
not inconsiderable.

He sold his prints for five cents apiece, and then the patterns turned up
replicated on extremely expensive jewellery in Tiffany’s. He never knew
either wealth or fame. After his parents died, he lived alone in a small part of
their house, while his brothers and sisters occupied the rest. One fine day, at
the age of sixty-six, as he was out walking in the snow, ten kilometres away
from home, the cold got to his bones; but he still wanted—absolutely—to see
something, a beautiful ice stalactite hanging from a pine branch. A storm blew

up. People called him. But he went on looking. He looked at the delicate,
graceful shape of the piece of ice, its slender, fragile, sensitive stem, its