On Looking: Essays (13 page)

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Authors: Lia Purpura

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The field is a tide the flowers ride out—far past the body I am using as measure.
 
 
Song
I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.
 
 
Tally
A web across the honeysuckle shifts light like beads on an abacus. Back and forth, doing its sums, it golden subtractions.
 
 
Third Cutting: Rising
It’s some kind of butterfly: orange and black but smaller than the Monarch, smaller, too, than the Viceroy, something crazier that dips and flies up, scallops the air, looks like a kite a child is coaxing. Across the field its path is all sharp peaks and perfect troughs.
Across the field
means the whole way is clear and uninterrupted.
I look into the distance. The disheveled air above the green is a field itself, a haze of new heat where insects bob, slipknot, and careen.
Now my eye finds the dark edge of the field with ease.
Even after all my work, the low brush and honeysuckle were still too close—too close to the house, too close to sight, and so my host came with big clippers and chopped the rest back.
And when he clamped the blades around the base of the bush and pulled the long wooden handles together, he made a little grunting sound. I heard it from inside the house, the intimacy of dismantling, and then a softer rustle as he pulled the branches free. His exhalation, that smallest breath came for the bush and marked its falling.
Then: a confetti of moths in a freshet of air, rising because the way was clear. Scraps of distance seaming up, all the flecks caught in rays, the motes aloft.
A dragonfly slowed midair, hovering like a coppery breath.
Then the oddest ache came: a body that small, and everything
works
—the up and the down inseparable, thoughtless; the motion-as-stasis; the most perfect eyesight; the two sets of wings, their colors like pangs of disbelief.
The way through the field is entirely clear. There is nothing between the far woods and me—just motes, moths, mouths, that coppery breath, the whole raucous force rising, breathing and turning.
 
 
Return
The wild turkey moves with her chicks across the field, dips her head down and raises it, eating and picking in no hurry at all. Then she settles into the tall grass. I have the whole field, the view thrown wide, the rolling and sifting, but the liveliest part is not for the eye. She stays and stays. I want her to come out again, and when she does, her head is a spot of reddened grain.
 
 
The Whole
With no dormer of green framing the sky, no honeysuckle scrimming the light, I expect the field now, the whole arrayed, expect the wide sweep in front of me—the curled fists of new ferns, the milkweeds’ closed hooves among the tall grass. Thistles. Daisies. The clamorous reach of purple asters.
Further off, the turkey is a drop of sound,
oak, oak,
far back in its throat,
oak
, wetly and darkly, only the sound burrowing in, finding a spot in the sway of grasses. The grasses lapping like a body of water.
 
 
Darknesses
Everything in the field has a name, one the eye pulls from the wash of green to steady itself:
saw grass, timothy.
And where the field stops and the woods begin?
The abrupt edge,
bird watchers say, a sheltering darkness made wholly of green.
 
 
Reprieve
Earlier in my visit, she would have appeared in smudges through the tangled brush, a flash of red, her brown-flecked body a crumple of patterns. Now she steps, for long moments, into the open.
Nearby, the chicks are learning their way through the field. A cool, almost cold breeze blows, and they stop. And when they move off again, they’re into the phlox.
I see the stalks crush underfoot.
I can see, too, the chicks following her. And when they scatter into the field, how they part the long grass like rivulets and are gone.
Imperceptibly, as a day deepens.
As my friend is going.
As the distance is going, piecemeal to the edge.
Lush edge where sight stops and the body goes in.
 
(in memory, Margot Bos Stambler)
 
Falling Houses: mise-en-scene
 
I
know someone who drops houses.
Small houses. Condemned ones. He buys them for nothing and uses cranes and helicopters to haul, then drop them from on high, then he drops the pieces until they reduce to sharp angles and wire and corrugation, and he photographs the drops.
For a while I just looked at the photos—the colors, the angles, the motion. The order of descending shapes. The evolutionary lopping of edges, the cracking of form.
Now I don’t know what to think. But I think I’m supposed to be thinking. So here goes:
The subject doesn’t seem to be the ominous destruction of the family.
The process isn’t wasteful, since the houses are going to be demolished anyway.
I read that the artist doesn’t like to talk about how he does it—that he “never intended the process to be a concern for the viewer.” He just takes the pictures and presents them, massive and simply framed. He is “happier when people react to the actual image.”
But then, his catalog provides all these sneak peeks at the process . . . helicopters positioning houses for a drop; the cluttered work sites; rented trailers and folding tables loaded with lunch; plans unscrolled like blueprints; disembodied fingers pointing; the artist, central in white T-shirt and jeans, walkie-talkie clipped to his belt wearing his regulation hard hat.
So now I’m thinking about ruins, the conscious creation of ruins.
I’m thinking that to ruin a thing, one must behave like time and weather, assume the prerogative of the elements. Or the point of view of a child standing over a dirt world, finger outstretched, alert to his shadow darkening the hills. The foot-soldier ants. The rain rivulets coursing through towns, pebble roads, rosebud cars. Raise a hand up, bring a hand down. One must have a mind for roughshod turns of phrase to say
create a ruin.
I suppose these might be models of houses hung against blue backing, plush velvet for texture and to absorb the light richly. I suppose he could have pinned the model with wire from above, snipped the wire, and let the house fall, burned out the tripod’s shadow when printing. Or for menacing turbulence, cast shadows with pieces of cardboard, thrown dust in the air, or Venetian glitter (imported, fifty to eighty dollars an ounce) to get the effect of a storm approaching, that particular colloidal havoc. He might have filtered a tinge of green to deepen the sky. Learned, from a guy we both knew who grew up in Oklahoma, to view the storm-world from the belly of a ditch, to try that angle, and shoot the house as it pulley-and-levered by in a hail of marbles (Cat’s Eyes, nineteen dollars a sack at Land of Marbles, in New York.)
There must be a thousand ways to make a thing seem to be a falling house, and the story behind it big.
Oh.
I get it.
Making-it-seem.
No houses are falling.
The site isn’t real. The crew isn’t real.
Everything made is coming unmade.
Da Vinci—forgive me for harkening, of course it’s unfair, out of step, out of line, a bit panicky, I know—Da Vinci drew the human body as if he were the body’s creator, instructing us, once he himself perfected the gesture, about how, precisely when the arm extends, these muscles pull, and these wrap and cantilever bone. He wrote it all down, every move, to show the world—so hidden, so close—just below a flap a skin.
Or, put this way, Schiller wrote in “Ode to Joy,” and of the poem itself, “this is my kiss to the world.”
What must the artist think of us studying his catalog’s photos of crews, the crane, the hard hats, the crowds assembling? Is he having a laugh? Is anyone laughing?
Am I missing any laughter here?
 
Isn’t it good to laugh a little?
 
I’m looking up, as the artist suggests, into the blue, blue, blue of the photograph sky, and see there the green corner of a roof coming toward me. There’s a sweetness to the green. A sadness to the falling.
If I know I’ve been led to believe a house is falling, can this picture still be an ode?
Can it constitute a song of praise, glorify a history, embody the broken, lost-forever, irretrievable bygone and frame it up against the clear sky?
Couldn’t I go so far as to say here is our age’s response to still-life, and sidle it up to the seventeenth century’s Dutch flowers/fish/fruit picked and held precisely, lusciously up to the light, or against the high sheen of a gathering dark?
What is this note and tone of green pressed flat against the so-very blue?
Critique? Transgression?
Subversion, appropriation? Is this “terrain?” (Not, of course, real dusty ruts and vertiginous drop-offs, but nonetheless that which is meant to be rocky, uncharted?)
Here is a process, wherein we’re meant to see something whole hoisted, dropped, and hoisted again until there’s nothing left to lift and drop.
Is this playing like an elegy?
Am I feeling elegiac?
And don’t the complications of this project (staging the sites, trussing the houses) have something to do with art’s inherent artifice? (To go through all this to drop a house!)
Are these very questions the subject—heady, cloudy as they are—as others have chosen sinew and muscle and bone for their study?
Is it stupid to talk about Da Vinci, who bled animals dry, who pushed aside the yellow fat to slip his hands more deeply in, who drew quickly and, when not quickly enough, wore a mask to dull the scent?
Who drew with characteristic delicacy the most grotesque deformities. Who could lavish a wart. Caress a humpback.
 
Reread, now embraced by quotations marks, the following words four paragraphs above: “complications,” “sites,” “houses.” I think you’ll hear the particular laughter I was referring to earlier. Or at least an oscillation. Some tonal ether, some trickster wobble.
Or try these phrases I’ve made up, in catalogese:
“We speculate, yes, but are made to see only what the artist wants us to see . . . thus our unease, suspicion, doubt . . .” “. . . and that successful tension . . . charms, frustrates, cajoles.” I haven’t worked it out fully, but the words “indeterminate” and “mediate” would figure in somewhere.
I’m pretty sure these thoughts are obvious.
But what of the feelings these images stir?
I know, I know . . .
feelings
and
stir.
But I keep coming back to this spot of green. That’s all, just the green, which, above all, holds me. It’s of ripe avocados and hard young apples. Thin-skinned lake plants, as they float, cloud and wave. A curl of lime peel. New moss. Peridot, milked down with light. This simple-flat, sad-tender green, suspended against the broom-swept cirrus sky . . .
 
It’s been a year now since she died.
Of all the green I make a stillness. Of sun-through-leaves, now, this June, I make a stillness. Of all the green, transparent spots I make a moment. I make a moment to hold her, and she falls, really falls, every time.
Glaciology
 
Plan
When the snow began to melt, the drifts left behind a surprising collection of junk—paper cups, socks, Matchbox trucks, a snarl of CAUTION-POLICE-CAUTION tape, pinkly wrapped tampons, oil-rag T-shirts, banana peels: intimacies of toy box, bathroom, and garage amid the lumps of sand and salt we threw down for traction. It was as if after the big event of snowfall we’d forgotten there was more, still, to be said. A cache of loose details below to attend. A trove poised. A stealth gathering.
Deposition below the singular-seeming white cover.
I shall make my own study of snow and time. I will learn from that which has built the very ground I’m now slipping around on: glaciers. Their formative act: deposition, for example:
fine grained rock debris, rock flour, and coarse rock fragments picked up or entrained within the base of a glacier and then transported and deposited from either active or stagnant ice. This product of glacial deposition, known as till, consists of particles that follow complicated routes, being deposited on the top or along the sides of the glacier bed, entrained again, and finally dropped. As a sediment, till has certain distinctive features: it exhibits poor sorting, is usually massive, and consists of large stones in a fine matrix of minerals and rock types.

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