On Looking: Essays (11 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
The other day, in the early September sun, I walked for a block or so to try this out: hands behind my head and elbows out, to take up a lot of room, like the guy who had just passed me. He was walking down a wide, shady street, at home in the ease of his body’s expanse. And yes, walking that way, I take up a lot of room, as he did, but there’s this: when my hands are behind my head, my breasts lift up. Am I freer because I take up more space, or less free because now I’m even more seen? Do I provoke more attention, erode my own space, invite, by the provocation I cannot help being, another’s gaze into the scene?
I just want to be that guy, arms up in the cool air, my shoulders and neck stretching, lungs open, ribs rising.
I want to lift my shirt and scratch my stomach as a friend of mine does wherever he likes. “I do that?” he asks. Yes, you do, I point out—in the kitchen, in the store. On a walk. Wherever you like.
When will I stop thinking of her? my son asks and asks.
I have a friend who goes to strip joints. (And who, by the way, has written surprise compassion into those scenes, real compassion, the kind that shows he knows the below-deck of all the whirling hers in the dark surround: working mother, or artist, activist, would-be accountant. How formal and graceful his words become when touching, yes, touching, that other.) I have another friend who subscribes to
Playboy
. (Who thinks it’s more the anticipation—article, article, article: photo!—than the photos themselves that... do it for him.) What do I think about that, he asks. What do I think of his subscription. I tell him: why not? As in: go ahead. Live it up
.
I say
why not?
—because I, too, like to look. At everything. To see myself. To see myself being seen. Though
Playboy
certainly used to bother me. A lot, when I was eighteen. My son, reading his cousin’s 1970 collector’s edition one morning this summer when we were visiting, woke me saying “This is disgusting! Why are their clothes off?” At five a.m., this was all I could muster: I said it isn’t disgusting, that the body is beautiful and it’s natural to be naked, but the magazine isn’t for kids. Not at all, hand it over.
Playboy
. (Who thinks it’s more the anticipation—article, article, article: photo!—than the photos themselves that... do it for him.) What do I think about that, he asks. What do I think of his subscription. I tell him: why not? As in: go ahead. Live it up
.
I say
why not?
—because I, too, like to look. At everything. To see myself. To see myself being seen. Though
Playboy
certainly used to bother me. A lot, when I was eighteen. My son, reading his cousin’s 1970 collector’s edition one morning this summer when we were visiting, woke me saying “This is disgusting! Why are their clothes off?” At five a.m., this was all I could muster: I said it isn’t disgusting, that the body is beautiful and it’s natural to be naked, but the magazine isn’t for kids. Not at all, hand it over.
My son still thinks, by way of the perspective in photos or drawings in magazines that some people are really
very
small—say, two inches high, and you can hold them in your hand. Just pluck them out of the photo and pocket them. He wants to know where they live. A boy in Sudan on a tiny barren hill. Can I take him? he asks.
Home,
he means, and
can I hold him here safely?
very
small—say, two inches high, and you can hold them in your hand. Just pluck them out of the photo and pocket them. He wants to know where they live. A boy in Sudan on a tiny barren hill. Can I take him? he asks.
Home,
he means, and
can I hold him here safely?
There’s a scene I remember from college, an image so sharp and clear and impressive I remember thinking,
you’ll retain this.
It was my last year and I was standing outside the militant vegetarian co-op with a friend, talking. And I stopped, just stopped midsentence, and she looked in the direction I was looking. “He’s
cute,”
she said. But that wasn’t it at all. I was aware of his beauty, and of my easy desire, but more powerful still, I wanted to
be
him. I wanted the angular frame and slim hips, low belt and button-flys resting just so. I wanted the T-shirt’s sharp fall from his shoulders to fall from my shoulders. For a long moment he didn’t even have a face. I couldn’t unravel the two desires: I wanted to look and to touch, yes. But more than that, really, I wanted to
be
him.
you’ll retain this.
It was my last year and I was standing outside the militant vegetarian co-op with a friend, talking. And I stopped, just stopped midsentence, and she looked in the direction I was looking. “He’s
cute,”
she said. But that wasn’t it at all. I was aware of his beauty, and of my easy desire, but more powerful still, I wanted to
be
him. I wanted the angular frame and slim hips, low belt and button-flys resting just so. I wanted the T-shirt’s sharp fall from his shoulders to fall from my shoulders. For a long moment he didn’t even have a face. I couldn’t unravel the two desires: I wanted to look and to touch, yes. But more than that, really, I wanted to
be
him.
I look now, at forty, more like him than ever. I’ve pared down. I wear my pants low, with a belt and I tuck in my T-shirts, simple white T-shirts or green or black ones. And though I’ve lost the wide hips of a new mother and the full breasts for feeding, the lines of me are still rounded. Is this a body a man would want to inhabit? Would a man want to be—I mean walk, sleep, move—in this frame?
When I started to read the
Little House on the Prairie
books to my son, I was prepared. While I loved the characters, and identified with them fully—the sisters whose hands were cut from twisting straw into makeshift logs for the fire, their bare faces browned by hot, summer sun, their calico dresses, the rough crunch of batting and ticking at night as they slept—I was prepared for him not to like the books. I was ready for him to say “this is for girls.” But he didn’t. Not once. I believe he felt that slightest membrane between bodies, that he saw how easily one form can inhabit another. There, on the prairie, in the dug-out, the lean-to, he tasted their water, cool from a dipper. He slapped down the bread and basted by lamplight. He sang with the family. He blew out a candle. He slept with a quilt.
Little House on the Prairie
books to my son, I was prepared. While I loved the characters, and identified with them fully—the sisters whose hands were cut from twisting straw into makeshift logs for the fire, their bare faces browned by hot, summer sun, their calico dresses, the rough crunch of batting and ticking at night as they slept—I was prepared for him not to like the books. I was ready for him to say “this is for girls.” But he didn’t. Not once. I believe he felt that slightest membrane between bodies, that he saw how easily one form can inhabit another. There, on the prairie, in the dug-out, the lean-to, he tasted their water, cool from a dipper. He slapped down the bread and basted by lamplight. He sang with the family. He blew out a candle. He slept with a quilt.
He wanted to be one of them.
As he very much did not want to be small, and displayed at a fair in the heat of August.
The Space Between
Now, more than hitherto, there occurs shocks, surges, crossings, falls and almost scrambles, creating thus a different space, a space scattered and unknown, space enclosing spaces, superimposed, inserted, polyphonic perspectives.
—Henri Michaux
W
here is the fear this afternoon? Where did it go and why can’t I locate it now?
here is the fear this afternoon? Where did it go and why can’t I locate it now?
A goldfinch flies up while leaves, gold and russety, sift and fall. A flight up, a flight down, the very air marked, so both rising and falling are held in a furor of sunstruck ongoingness.
I am outside this bright afternoon.
And even as I am built anew by fear these days, here, in Baltimore, I am also, right now, assembled by the brisk feel of New England, and fall, and my childhood there. That peace. Those biting blue skies. The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute
now
. Of course, this moment has little to do with simple construction, simple addition. But it’s hard not to think in these terms.
now
. Of course, this moment has little to do with simple construction, simple addition. But it’s hard not to think in these terms.
I’ll try again.
Events crosshatch: the air this afternoon is cleanly scented, still unstark, and in it, among sheering leaves, among goldfinches lifting and scalloping air, a sniper—in a patch of woods, gas station, mall parking lot—is hiding, aiming and shooting.
And here, too, is the heavy sweater I’m wearing, thin at the elbows, the bruisy ferment of old apples, leaf dust, clouds stacked high in the west,
peace
.
peace
.
Other things, too, are stacking up today: campaigns for Maryland’s governor, though few of us now seem to notice, so frightened are we to pump gas, to let the children walk to school.
Candidates must wrest control of voter attention,
the paper says. “Rest” I say to my son, who learned from other kindergartners there’s a bad person out there shooting, my son who’s going to take it easy this afternoon, play Crazy 8’s, maybe a little chess, inside.
Candidates must wrest control of voter attention,
the paper says. “Rest” I say to my son, who learned from other kindergartners there’s a bad person out there shooting, my son who’s going to take it easy this afternoon, play Crazy 8’s, maybe a little chess, inside.
Inside such perfect weather, an investigation is mounting. State Mounties are out on their horses, horses such as the angry men mounted this evening as they rode out of De Smet, Dakota Territories, to a riot at Stebbins camp, deep in Montana, 1878, I read to my son as he went uneasily to bed. As the Ingalls family rested uneasily
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
in the perpetual
now
that is book time. The children tucked in, the lake serene, the riot ongoing in moonlight,
on a night just like this,
I point out the window and up, to where “the great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light.” The moon outside Joseph’s window. The very moon that swallowed both that writer’s fear, and mine.
By the Shores of Silver Lake,
in the perpetual
now
that is book time. The children tucked in, the lake serene, the riot ongoing in moonlight,
on a night just like this,
I point out the window and up, to where “the great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light.” The moon outside Joseph’s window. The very moon that swallowed both that writer’s fear, and mine.
See how the moments go layering up?
These days, late afternoons in our small living room, a form unfurls and spreads its weave—music building and cloaking, uncloaking and reaching. The fugue my husband is working on makes available to light, and with a light of its own brings forth a moment: amber with its captured specks, bubbles of breath and veering planes. And across the country, now, right now, in that other Washington, where it’s a still-bright two in the afternoon, there’s a search on for bullets a suspect once fired into a stand of trees. In a quiet neighborhood, ATF agents saw down stumps and haul them away in trucks as evidence.
Consider their find: cross-sectioned rings interrupted by bullets, all the loops of years pierced.
The loops of years pierced and containing the point.
This time of year, when the sky darkens early and clouds stack up in thick, western swells, I see therein a mountain range I once knew. (The sniper, we will come to learn, had a mount for his gun in the trunk of his car: the trunk of his car a small terrain of roughened upholstery, the gun at rest there, those beveled edges along the muzzle, the boredom of waiting, his fingernails scraping up curls of grime, flicking them off. Sun in a beam through the punched-out lock reaching a summit, casting its curves.)
Let me come back, though, to the matter at hand.
When the sky darkens and clouds rise like a near mountain range, my neighborhood plunges into a valley, makes of itself one of the small, snug towns I loved as a child in New England. I’d like you to believe, as I wanted to believe, that I actually “lived as a child in New England,” for I felt such familiarity when visiting, as if I’d found a home I hadn’t known I’d lost—in Great Barrington, East Hardwick, at our friends’ small farm in Clarkesville, New Hampshire, way up near the Canadian border.
What it
is
—is what
else
it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.
is
—is what
else
it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.
What it is—is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall;
leaves
dry, scratch and blow, not
crabs,”
I’m jittery walking down the street—not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid—but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an
elsewhere
comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind—and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.
leaves
dry, scratch and blow, not
crabs,”
I’m jittery walking down the street—not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid—but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an
elsewhere
comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind—and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.
I mean to say, too, that it’s not all jittery, these exchanges. I remember seeing, at my uncle’s house, a cat’s brain, preserved, and how the brain’s topography slid into more: a crush of continents ribboning up, river-valleys gone to inclines, post-glacial, scoured and jarred. And how standing in front of the pen-and-ink drawings of neurons, those cells were stretching, wavering blooms, tributaries, sidewalk cracks.
Things pair up to go forth.
When I am clear enough to catch it, it’s the motion of Bach’s Prelude XIV, the sense of it-all-going-on-at-once, one voice seeding always the next swell, unending, the swell out-spinning, the strands of sound buoyant, a weave tightened and cinched like the lip of a purse until the last tilt, and the pucker of folds lets the gold go.
And my husband’s sure fingers are cresting sound as they have moved over all that I am, and all I am overrun by.
I came across this a while ago: “In music the distance and the nearness of space, the limitless and the limited are all together in one gentle unity that is a comfort and a benefaction to the soul.”
The space
a comfort.
a comfort.
A
benefaction
:
benefaction
:
And
what
in the soft air, the chalk-blue of the blue spruce, the sky orange and pink just the other morning as I took the garbage out—
what
ferried me past my fear? What brought me instead to my old summer job as a coffee vendor, lower Manhattan, awake before dawn on Avenue C, the junkies cooled off, the Bowery wide and dank and mine to share with the bakery trucks, the newspaper trucks, just a few of us going out, a few coming home. Here’s the blue dawn air settling over the cart I readied at my corner in front of Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway—here now, in October, at six a.m., and fifteen years later.
what
in the soft air, the chalk-blue of the blue spruce, the sky orange and pink just the other morning as I took the garbage out—
what
ferried me past my fear? What brought me instead to my old summer job as a coffee vendor, lower Manhattan, awake before dawn on Avenue C, the junkies cooled off, the Bowery wide and dank and mine to share with the bakery trucks, the newspaper trucks, just a few of us going out, a few coming home. Here’s the blue dawn air settling over the cart I readied at my corner in front of Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway—here now, in October, at six a.m., and fifteen years later.
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