On Looking: Essays (8 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
I knew someone who saw a nest he wanted—it was beautifully constructed and hung darkly over a field’s edge in the fall when the trees were bare—and he sawed down a tree limb to get it: absolutely not.
Picking up a sugar egg and putting the eye to it produced a mild dizziness, a sense of falling, of falling into it... just as there is falling involved in the presence of certain words, all palpable shade and tint and scene:
“Where were you?” “The
hall
.” (no falling)
hall
.” (no falling)
“Where were you?” The
foyer/corridor/vestibule.
” (recondite, strange feel in the mouth, but, yes, falling)
foyer/corridor/vestibule.
” (recondite, strange feel in the mouth, but, yes, falling)
“Where were you” Oh,
nowhere
(falling: kid’s version, the kid discovered, listening in)
nowhere
(falling: kid’s version, the kid discovered, listening in)
Eavesdropping (yes! Barest breath close against the door, shine of paint, fingernail idly along the grooved frame, the few clear words like little promises, tacit permission to be there).
Parlors (and parlours), if the drapes are drawn (not
shut
or
pulled
and God, not
closed
). And if it is between three and five in the afternoon and it is turn-of-the-century uncertain outside and at least one member of the household plays Chopin
(well.
And Liszt and Schubert too—why not? It is my parlor under construction). In there, the dark walnut furniture is beeswaxed to a pitch, higher up the scale of light than the neighbor’s divan, she who’s come to call and perches for an
interlude
(falling!) amidst armoires, ottomans, antimacassars, to listen to Chopin (oldest daughter,
Barcarole
), one son, “the little dauphin,” scuttling through. The globelike lamps and the beaded lamps and, most important, stillest air. It must be unstirred, and one must stand gingerly at the threshold. Leaning into the room, over the velvet rope, permitted. Not to “get a better look” but to tilt out of the place where both feet are securely planted.
shut
or
pulled
and God, not
closed
). And if it is between three and five in the afternoon and it is turn-of-the-century uncertain outside and at least one member of the household plays Chopin
(well.
And Liszt and Schubert too—why not? It is my parlor under construction). In there, the dark walnut furniture is beeswaxed to a pitch, higher up the scale of light than the neighbor’s divan, she who’s come to call and perches for an
interlude
(falling!) amidst armoires, ottomans, antimacassars, to listen to Chopin (oldest daughter,
Barcarole
), one son, “the little dauphin,” scuttling through. The globelike lamps and the beaded lamps and, most important, stillest air. It must be unstirred, and one must stand gingerly at the threshold. Leaning into the room, over the velvet rope, permitted. Not to “get a better look” but to tilt out of the place where both feet are securely planted.
Hands cupped around eyes: perfect; makes a parlor of anywhere.
It is tempting here to suggest “corner”—where, as a child, one is made to stand (where my son exiles himself, preemptively sometimes). But like the attic and the basement (no and no, except in recollection—then yes, powerfully, in recollection) a corner has to be entered with the body. And to enter that way dissolves the space as I know it.
Dutch doors, the top half swung open. (Leaning in.) Yes.
My father’s boxes, dioramic, collaged, behind glass. In the early days, filled with simple wooden cones and spheres. Today, the objects and colors he uses conjure moments, compose atmospheres. There are deep blue night-backgrounds, empty piazzas, stamp-sized doors to open and close, black and white seas, silver birds, tiny bricks, crystal balls, red and green devils’ faces. And when I gaze off, begin to consider what my father was thinking, and think I have before me the decisions he made about hanging this egg or gold-leafing that one, lining up the blue Buddhas next to all those Virgin Marys, when I think I know his intent, his desire, find a flare of intuition I think I recognize, I always look away. I turn back to the box itself, enter, and wander there. More than anything, I do not want to be outside, thinking.
I’ve always suspected the crystal ball was an aid, not a magical thing itself. I’ve always thought that looking into it and seeking that inversion, that high shine and upended swirl one could read the mind’s wanderings, hold them, amid the argot of fate and the moment’s demands, quietly enough to read.
Amber: the tiny faults and refractions, themselves translucent, like little rooms the sun has caught, walls it found as backdrop for—smallest gift—a fly locked in sap. A stanza is a little room from which gifts emerge; also, in Italian:
a stopping place.
Like roadside altars, or shrines above busy intersections, in Rome or Florence—there behind glass and set into the building, where the eye travels up, rests from wandering and is rewarded for its pause, invited in.
a stopping place.
Like roadside altars, or shrines above busy intersections, in Rome or Florence—there behind glass and set into the building, where the eye travels up, rests from wandering and is rewarded for its pause, invited in.
A finger-sized doll I had whose home was a heart-shaped genie bottle, transparent and hinged at the bottom so you could pop her out to play. (I never popped her out.)
Dollhouses: yes, until the dolls move in and rummage around and start to talk. And wreck the penumbral, late Sunday afternoon of it all.
Not wasps’ nests attached to the undersides of eaves or bare branches leaning low to the ground, chamber after chamber hunched together, silvery-crisp. Even in fall, when nests are often torn or pulled apart, so many chambers are tightly capped—and the others, too dark to see into.
The Madame Lulu box: a pill box I very much admired—and was given by Madame herself visiting from France. My attraction to the box was immediate, produced from the dark of her bag as she sat in our living room with her knees touching the coffee table. I cared not at all for the tiniest pills she tipped out, and only a little for the sweet dust I licked from the box after she transferred the pills to a second, plainer one. I saw only the blue, convex, enameled scene on top: a shepherdess resting in a bower (and this forever my definition of a bower). There was a castle in the misty background and a shepherd-boy so near, who—oh, it was terribly discreet but I saw the implications—bent over her. It was the depth of the scene I fell into, the arc they made, heads together, the tiny will-o’-the-wisp between them in the distance. The scene opened a room inside me into which I could peer, and about which, in college I wrote critically, as is still the fashion today when considering the pastoral. But I still love the box.
Perfume rings, their domes unlocked and there, the musky amber wax to dip into and spread along a wrist—
ambergris
it used to be, culled from the ears of whales. And poison rings, as they were called, holding bits of bone and snatches of hair from saints or martyrs, to gaze upon for luck and to ward off evil.
ambergris
it used to be, culled from the ears of whales. And poison rings, as they were called, holding bits of bone and snatches of hair from saints or martyrs, to gaze upon for luck and to ward off evil.
Music boxes? No. But trying to rig the ballerina to stay upright and so keep dancing when the box is closed and the space goes dark and musicless.
How
to keep her spring unbent, her tilted pirouette ongoing? To try with fishing line and copper wire. Peeking in, the box half-shut. Being
sure
there was a way, the afternoon’s endeavor. (Slight fever, gray day, persistence.) Yes.
How
to keep her spring unbent, her tilted pirouette ongoing? To try with fishing line and copper wire. Peeking in, the box half-shut. Being
sure
there was a way, the afternoon’s endeavor. (Slight fever, gray day, persistence.) Yes.
Deep in its peering, its leaning and looking, where is the body? Where (use the View-Master!) is the dinosaur, Rockette, icy waterfall? Where, oh where is Amelia Earhardt? I did so love her, and when I was ten, read all about her—crinkly eyes, faint splash of freckles, the soft, kid, aviator’s helmet (so
that
was
kid!).
Yes. That moment when a word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.
that
was
kid!).
Yes. That moment when a word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.
A clear rattle filled with little multicolored beads: an hourglass-in-training. And a sand-filled, grown-up one, too.
On the boardwalk this summer I found the space in souvenir key chains; inside of each is a tiny photoed boardwalk that brightens when you hold it to the light, peer through the squared-off pyramid and follow the scene to its tiny, pinpoint perspective’s end. And there you stand, eye to the hole, face to the light, looking at the place you’re in, without you.
“The mystery of things, little sensations of time, great void of eternity! All infinity can be contained in this stove corner between the fireplace and the oak chest. . . . Where are they now I ask you! All those marvelous, spidery delights of yours, those profound meditations on poor, little dead things . . .” asks Oscar de Milosz.
Where?
A sugar egg is their temporary home.
Open air version: on the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus in Rome, the chariots gone; the racket of horses colliding, gone; the pile-up leaving a way for the lesser horse and that victory-by-default, all gone. Time doing its tricks, so the deep quiet enfolds. Even as the traffic rushes by behind you.
A camera: last century’s, the head and back draped, one eye to the glass, for the long, dark passage toward oceanliner, great fire, beloved’s face.
Sea Monkeys in a jar. Ordered from the back of an Archie comic. Aquiline, shirred: there he is. I’m sure that’s the one, with his little gold crown, fuzzily perched: King Sea Monkey. And floating around, waiting to attend his Highness—all the Monkeys of his court. So that he might best survey his royal waters, rule his tepid kingdom from on high, I shall lift him onto my finger into the air. (Of course I don’t. But I want to.)
Under a thirty-year-old microscope, the thirty-year-old slides showing the liver cells of a frog, their still-shapely coronas and gray, hazy stars. The heart of frog and bottlebrush spore, featherfowl point and butterfly scale. No longer “prettily a-moving” as Anton van Leewenhoek said of his animalcules, but held, stilled, still available—if a little yellowed, a little dry.
The tiny person folded knees-to-chest contained in the head of a sperm, the homunculus in his watery world: yes. Even if a conjecture, and sketched from only that.
Leewenhoek destroying his specially ground lenses before his death, that hoarding: no.
The enormous prize bull at the Ohio State Fair, whose testicles stunned even the solemn farmers into low, whistling analogy,
cantaloupes, watermelons
(no kidding), as they stepped back. Stepping back: yes, lengthening the scene, so awe has a little room to breathe. That courtesy.
cantaloupes, watermelons
(no kidding), as they stepped back. Stepping back: yes, lengthening the scene, so awe has a little room to breathe. That courtesy.
Not the real-but-stuffed bear in the dining room of the Pennsylvania brewhaus, but en route, the bear nailed to the barn wall, splayed like a star. The body aloft and flying, and the barn, a terrible, red wind behind it. And everything framed and reduced by the car window as we slowed down to get a better look.
What is gazing into a sugar egg? A way of being sealed away, destiny-less, in a sanctuary with no purpose at all, save being led. A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words. And in the web between thumb and forefinger, the reddened streams of veins. The very river you’re reading about, the mighty Mississippi right there. Right there in your hand, near the warm, pliable rim of shore.
Ships in bottles.
Lighthouses? No, because they have a job. But a lighthouse in a bottle: yes.
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