On Looking: Essays (6 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
So often these days my son—who is busy getting the basics down—asks “why?” and “is that the rule?” Here’s what I think to myself (though I sometimes impatiently say “
Yes
, it’s the
rule
”): I make the rule up, moment to moment. I mean, the moment conjures the rule.
Yes
, it’s the
rule
”): I make the rule up, moment to moment. I mean, the moment conjures the rule.
Like this:
the surface temperature must drop below freezing, must drop below dew point; the dew point must hover, and then frost will form.
By reaching into the nothing there.
The emptiness waits to crystallize, to filigree.
It’s the same emptiness the clam steps into, stretches its single, pink, muscular foot toward. The clam stirs the water. Hits something hard: retracts/waits/proceeds. Foot out and in, it stitches along.
A few days after surgery, as I write this, recovering, I am thinking about stitches. Behind bare trees is the hard blue sky. The snow-glare reflects and it’s very bright. Three planes mark white, discrete lines in the sky. I look away for what seems just a moment and when I turn back, the jet trails are gone. Wholly dissolved and the blue is all healed. Just like that.
Just
like
.
like
.
I saw once a reenactment of an old British parlor game,
Similes
. The host goes around the circle asking “Slippery as a _____ ,” “Sharp as a _____,” and the players fill in the correct word—that is, the known, the agreed-upon. As a
fish
. As a
tack.
It’s a game for those who like playing by rules, slipping into, not standing back from. Those wanting a clean end. As a fish! As a tack! No watching for forms, no rogue search here, but much good citizenry all around. Bright as a ______?
Star-
bright, of course. Not
bright as frost. Fern-bright. Fern-dark. Sea-fern green. Fern-frosted. In the fern-frosted silence. The dead man’s fingers frosted over. Ice-sharp. The stitched sky. A filigree purse.
Similes
. The host goes around the circle asking “Slippery as a _____ ,” “Sharp as a _____,” and the players fill in the correct word—that is, the known, the agreed-upon. As a
fish
. As a
tack.
It’s a game for those who like playing by rules, slipping into, not standing back from. Those wanting a clean end. As a fish! As a tack! No watching for forms, no rogue search here, but much good citizenry all around. Bright as a ______?
Star-
bright, of course. Not
bright as frost. Fern-bright. Fern-dark. Sea-fern green. Fern-frosted. In the fern-frosted silence. The dead man’s fingers frosted over. Ice-sharp. The stitched sky. A filigree purse.
I just came upon this, in a book I’m reading: “When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.”
The frost. The crystals. A Dead Man with secrets moving like fingers: it’s all here. All there. Here and there, piling up. What does my friend want his students to say, what does he want them to stumble into, considering those obituaries? “Nothing in particular,” he’d answer, meaning “I have no plan.” No one thing in mind. Only for them to skid to a halt, to go breathlessly forth, for here is their chance to see: the patterns keep coming, all the lives theirs resemble—in the newspaper photo, the deceased at age twenty, the jaunty tilt of that head so like the tilt of their own. That they share the same name, the same birthday and interests. That the most basic, seismic events daily converge and include us.
Daily Seismics
A few days ago, six o’clock at night: I am cutting strawberries and thinking of my father. I call him up. His hand is on the phone, ready to call me. It is six o’clock. He is cutting strawberries.
A few days ago, at dinner, I suggest that my friend read
The Gift
by Lewis Hyde. I try my best to say why, and why now in her life she should read it, try to sum it all up as an antidote to troubling times. Hope I’ve done a convincing job. I feel very strongly about this, though I wonder if I’ve been prescriptive, annoying. When we finish our meal, I drive home and park on the street. I pull up behind a car whose license plate reads “HYDE.”
The Gift
by Lewis Hyde. I try my best to say why, and why now in her life she should read it, try to sum it all up as an antidote to troubling times. Hope I’ve done a convincing job. I feel very strongly about this, though I wonder if I’ve been prescriptive, annoying. When we finish our meal, I drive home and park on the street. I pull up behind a car whose license plate reads “HYDE.”
And yesterday morning, settling in with the dictionary to find some new words, I land first on
hagioscope
: a small opening in the interior wall of a church designed so those in the transept can see the altar. I write the word down and its definition. Later in the day, at the dentist’s office, I open a magazine and there, right there, is a review of a book called
Hagioscope
.
hagioscope
: a small opening in the interior wall of a church designed so those in the transept can see the altar. I write the word down and its definition. Later in the day, at the dentist’s office, I open a magazine and there, right there, is a review of a book called
Hagioscope
.
Each time, the sensation of being slapped on the back, of some joke in the air:
don’t say I never gave you nothin’.
don’t say I never gave you nothin’.
Something’s near coughing from laughing so hard.
The jet trail’s white stitches. The white haze of recovery. After my first surgery, years ago,
those
stitches, in black, the whole length of my spine. And now, lying here, I’m remembering that recovery room and in the bed next to me, the ballet star, also thirteen, who would never again dance, the scoliosis twisting her spine, and the surgery, a fusion like mine, inevitable. How, clutching her parents, she sobbed for days, “What will I do? What will I do?” In bed, today, thinking of her, I pick up the paper, flip to the obituaries:
Tanaquil Le Clercq, 71, the ballerina who dazzled the world in the 1940s and ’50s before her career was cut short by paralytic polio . . .
and how she went on, as another person. Choreographer. Teacher. Author.
those
stitches, in black, the whole length of my spine. And now, lying here, I’m remembering that recovery room and in the bed next to me, the ballet star, also thirteen, who would never again dance, the scoliosis twisting her spine, and the surgery, a fusion like mine, inevitable. How, clutching her parents, she sobbed for days, “What will I do? What will I do?” In bed, today, thinking of her, I pick up the paper, flip to the obituaries:
Tanaquil Le Clercq, 71, the ballerina who dazzled the world in the 1940s and ’50s before her career was cut short by paralytic polio . . .
and how she went on, as another person. Choreographer. Teacher. Author.
In the portrait by John Singer Sargent, “Lady Agnew, 1892,” the subject looks so startlingly like me that others over the years have sent postcards and reproductions noting this. Lady Agnew sits languidly in a wing chair, in a light purple dress, worn as easily as a breath. I wear nothing that easily. And though there is much unlike me here—her slightly skewed gaze, one eye looking up, the other off to her right, the longer, narrower waist, and gold worn at the wrist—more stubbornly, potently, I am there: in the widow’s peak, and dark, arched eyebrows, one steeper than the other, the body held firmly against the chair’s frame, face intent, its jumpiness contained. The long sleeves pushed up past the elbows: I do that, assuming the day will take work. I see in her how I try, and fail, to hide my impatience. An art historian calls her “elegantly assured,” her expression “tantalizingly ambivalent,” notes that her face “seems all possibility.” In her lap she holds the tight bud of a white rose, which could be crumpled paper or a handkerchief at first—something beautiful and useful, or used. She seems both resistant and engaging at once. The sash at her waist is tied tightly, and yet an armful of purple silk falls in a bright sheen over her thigh and down in a broad heap of soft folds, like a bouquet of lilies, upended. Its studied drape is made to look casual. Her hair is pulled back but rises above her forehead and gathers in a shadow at the back of her neck. I look hard at the painting, as if at a mirror, waiting for it to reveal me more fully to myself. Where her hair and the background darken together, her left ear is obscured, so the viewer’s eye slides easily down, over the flushed ridge of collarbone along a gold chain to a pendant. And there, reduced and contained, the icy blues and plums collect.
At the pendant’s center is a stirring of light, a reflection shaped like a heart, or a keyhole. A reflection shaped like a snowy owl, its tiny wings folded and head tucked in.
A snowy owl that is also a heart, if you squint a bit. That is also a keyhole, if you look at it sidelong. If you believe that, off to the side, so many things hover, and wait to come in.
Brown
I
n this body of brown, in this pile of sticks come upon on my walk, are two black, stripped-bare ones, and a snarl of red vines mingling in, crawling up, or of a mind to. And there’s some yellow gone past its bearings, all underside and protected curl. There’s a yellow sanctified. An escharotic. Hints and tangles. Yes, brown’s a combustion, moving and reckless. Brown’s a lobster of moss and bark. (Remember these tender antennae in air, probing for signals and knowing
don’t touch rock, anemone, star, but sift for a radiant depth, bent and scattered.)
n this body of brown, in this pile of sticks come upon on my walk, are two black, stripped-bare ones, and a snarl of red vines mingling in, crawling up, or of a mind to. And there’s some yellow gone past its bearings, all underside and protected curl. There’s a yellow sanctified. An escharotic. Hints and tangles. Yes, brown’s a combustion, moving and reckless. Brown’s a lobster of moss and bark. (Remember these tender antennae in air, probing for signals and knowing
don’t touch rock, anemone, star, but sift for a radiant depth, bent and scattered.)
And, too, with a stick in its mouth of sticks, joy in its face as it comes from the tangle, brown’s a dog, straight-on, (mid-run, it must be) eyes shadowed and nose, that brightness, a wetness. Its tail a live coil diving back in. A dog decohering.
Fascicle. Fascia.
Driving toward
fascis: a bundle.
Fascicle. Fascia.
Driving toward
fascis: a bundle.
Then it all pares away.
Brown junks and darkens upon itself.
Starts over again the next day.
I’ve always disliked, in the name of precision, and for their resolve, landmarks.
Brown meanders.
There’s that lobster again, right here, the size of, oh ten or twelve dog heads—one of which is all I can make of this form emerging from its tender surround, the scrawl of it, the matter crisscrossing, those buckled, stray, wiry shoots shooting out. Over grainy, bright eskers. Honeycomb rotars. Rump curves and cochlear swirls pricked up. Black eyes on stems. Haunches ruffled in wind.
A lobster-dog.
Which if I had to look for, en route, means I’d find a pile of sticks, and turn left, and keep going, since such an attraction cannot be arranged.
Sugar Eggs: A Reverie
F
or years I have collected the occasions for this space—perhaps, in part, for just this occasion, which I do not expect will finalize the subject in any way. The space I’m speaking of has its perfections—though you’ll see how I’ll have to name it, and name it again to try to get at it. (A list, after all, is an incantation. In a list of likenesses, each element, each peculiarity gathers, leans into and flicks on the light in the room of the next one. The elements loop and knot forth like a net, band as a colony of frost or coral reaching, suggesting not so much a progression as a collective tendency toward. And taken together, the elements offer the assurance of a stance: here is a way to speak of this lightest, barely perceptible—in this case—space. From here I can count and collect that which stirs, and has always stirred me.)
or years I have collected the occasions for this space—perhaps, in part, for just this occasion, which I do not expect will finalize the subject in any way. The space I’m speaking of has its perfections—though you’ll see how I’ll have to name it, and name it again to try to get at it. (A list, after all, is an incantation. In a list of likenesses, each element, each peculiarity gathers, leans into and flicks on the light in the room of the next one. The elements loop and knot forth like a net, band as a colony of frost or coral reaching, suggesting not so much a progression as a collective tendency toward. And taken together, the elements offer the assurance of a stance: here is a way to speak of this lightest, barely perceptible—in this case—space. From here I can count and collect that which stirs, and has always stirred me.)
A list inches one closer. Hints along.
So. This space has something to do with the distance between the eye and the rioting, tumbling, crashing stuff a kaleidoscope’s mirrors tilt and multiply (glycerin, spangles, dichroic glass)—although a kaleidoscope’s stillness is interrupted, is meant to be interrupted by the novelty of combinations, a parade of rays and tatters, a wild field in storm.
The space is informed by the provocations of the hologram which show, by way of shadows and intensities of light emulsified, a tricky, flirting depth. And though you’d think it would be illustrated thus, the space I’m talking about is not well represented by the golden mean, those ever-increasing, spiral-sectioned rooms contained in the nautilus’s shell—each chamber’s archway carefully built and then, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his poem, “The Chambered Nautilus”—“its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed.” “Chamber” is certainly part of it. And somehow even “crypt.” But my space is more forestine: “like a green tunnel leading from the noise of summer into the silence.” It is more companionable, a space whose “quietness comes from the silence that is enclosed within it.”
I have been considering this space since I was a child and its particular atmosphere is best illustrated by—and I offer no apologies, mean not the least bit of kitschy irony here—sugar Easter eggs. The space is contained between the egg’s two crystallized halves, sugar-soldered around the middle, so the hollow inside shows (dimly through the sugar-domed sky) a scene: glazed disk of blue pond, whipped peaks of snowy mountain, hard yellow ducks with black-dot eyes and scalloped, grainy sugar bushes. Distant, rick-rack sugar trees. Pointy, rainbow flower-dots. The space is a privacy into which, as a child, I imagined, not my body but myself, eye to the window at the egg’s pointed end, the dim, egg-shaped world before me.
Recently I learned that Mitzi Purdue (author of
The I Want to EggScape Book
) coined the verb “to EggScape (tm)” which means “to escape into another world with the help of decorated eggs” and “to create seascapes, landscapes and decorative scenes in, on, or around eggs.” In her “Homage a Bob Ross” egg, a figurine of Bob, the TV painting instructor, stands on a craggy boulder painting a scene he sees before him which is, of course, the scene
we
see, peering into her egg. Mitzi points out the strategy of “infinite regress” which is a helpful concept here.
The I Want to EggScape Book
) coined the verb “to EggScape (tm)” which means “to escape into another world with the help of decorated eggs” and “to create seascapes, landscapes and decorative scenes in, on, or around eggs.” In her “Homage a Bob Ross” egg, a figurine of Bob, the TV painting instructor, stands on a craggy boulder painting a scene he sees before him which is, of course, the scene
we
see, peering into her egg. Mitzi points out the strategy of “infinite regress” which is a helpful concept here.
Along with other hints about proper foreground/background colors, and where to raise the horizon and how to properly stack or tessellate a mountain range to emphasize its essential—and necessary—imbalance, she says, “A good design principle to learn is ‘Dead center is deadly.’ Resist the ‘sniper scope’ approach, where you have the most important thing going on in the exact middle.”
Right. The exact middle is not what this space is about.
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