On Looking: Essays (5 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
In Botticelli’s portrait of St. Sebastian, the one I’ve looked at most recently in my ongoing study of St. Sebastians, it’s the outline of the arrows, the many, whole arrowheads buried beneath the skin, lodged in the flesh and those slight hillocks there, where the tip entered and stuck that holds me. So well-focused and attended, it’s more than a detail of the ecstasies of form: light, muscle, shadow. I think it’s what Botticelli wanted to paint most of all. The rise of flesh,
stippled, blue-bleak;
the body so changed and so reshaped, and how to praise that awful beauty—
pied. Plotted. Pierced
. I think this was the task he set himself.
stippled, blue-bleak;
the body so changed and so reshaped, and how to praise that awful beauty—
pied. Plotted. Pierced
. I think this was the task he set himself.
At one time I would go so far as to get out of the tub to better hear my neighbors fighting. I’d reach, dripping and freezing, over the toilet and open the window to listen more closely. I’d wish away the noisy trains coupling down the street. I’d wish away my housemate talking in the driveway below so that I might log new accusations in their falling and rising cadences. I practiced seeing gestures, appointed gestures to their words in the steamy cold. Deformities of anger, gnashing twisted mouths, inner bile stirred and poisoning their postures. I wished them peace, I did. But when they screamed, I felt I could see the corners of mouths pull back. I felt the word “gnashing” freeze a mouth. Eyebrows slant like blades sharply down. They were real gargoyles perched and turned to stone.
All the better for sketching.
Sketching, I consider the line: “These fragments I shore against my ruin”—from a time when so much was felt to be coming apart. But no. My fragments I shore to
reveal
my ruin. And all the similarities my eye is drawn to: flaw. Torque. Skew. I make a little pile by the shore: cracked horseshoe crab, ripped clam, wet ragged wing with feathers. I look because a thing is off, to locate the unlocatable in its features, forged as they are, or blunted, or blown. I look because the counter flashes its surprising grin.
reveal
my ruin. And all the similarities my eye is drawn to: flaw. Torque. Skew. I make a little pile by the shore: cracked horseshoe crab, ripped clam, wet ragged wing with feathers. I look because a thing is off, to locate the unlocatable in its features, forged as they are, or blunted, or blown. I look because the counter flashes its surprising grin.
My own deformities, of course, abound, but they are on the inside. I do not mean the flaws of reason, the insufficiencies of heart. I mean my spine fused and fixed in place with metal rods—all inside, except for the eleven months I wore a body cast. And then I was the walking ruin for all to see, the shore to keep in sight while sailing free.
The woman with the half-arm, no, a bit more than half an arm (it stopped below her elbow) stands chatting with her friends waiting for the bus. In a gesture she must have developed long ago, she rolls a magazine into a tube and slips her half-arm into it. How well and how long must the gesture have served, because, really, who hides an arm, a perfectly good arm, in a magazine? Whose but a child’s arm could be covered by a magazine, its length or its circumference?
One sees what one expects to see: “a magazine laid over the arm.” But because I saw the arm slip in, I see instead her quiet strategy. And what does looking at her, what does knowing that teach me—since all along in here I’ve been practicing, letting the sight-of work on me. And recording, recording, recording. I am not her parent and so do not feel guilt. I am not her sister and so do not feel that dual reprieve/protectiveness. I call up the warmth of such an arm in my hand (I don’t know if she says “stump”), the curve, the balance, its abrupt end, and the ghost of its missing length. I feel, like a child, neither moral nor immoral saying this. I feel many things.
When the eye sees something beautiful the hand wants to draw it.
Or here’s another way to say it:
a poem should not mean, but be.
a poem should not mean, but be.
There is not, as many think, any air at all in a jellyfish, just organized cilia and bell muscles, a gelatinous scaffolding for hydrostatic propulsion. These simplest drifters are like bubbles of milky glass—and who doesn’t want to see through to a thing’s inner workings, the red nerves, and blood and poison with a clear pulse, circulating. And yet one scientist says, “When thinking of jellies we have to suspend our bias towards hard skeletons with thick muscles and dense tissues.” He means in order to see their particular beauty, to see
them
, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.
them
, we have to suspend our fear. We have to love contraction. Filtration. The word “gelatinous,” too. The words “scull” and “buoyancy” are easy. We have to suspend “mucus web.” And realize that their bioluminescence, which is a show to see at night, is used to confuse and startle prey. You can look right through them. As if into a lit front room when it’s night outside.
Of course, we peer into houses at night not because they’re beautiful, but because we want to see what’s going on in there—illuminated, partial, and beckoning.
I’ve carried this image for a long time now: the port-wine birthmark on the girl’s pale face. All that summer at the beach, the mark was like a harbor, or what I knew of the shore, growing up near the ocean as I did. Tidal, it crept up near her eye and stayed like a dampness. I felt I was supposed to separate that color—velvety, royal, berrylike—from its place: her face, where it shouldn’t be. But I could not get the color to be unlovely. And I could not remove the mark from her face.
Magda, who worked at my favorite lunch counter in Warsaw, had the lovely, plain face of a farm girl. When she laughed, her white teeth shone and the scar in the middle of her chin puckered. And when she looked past me, into the distance, one eye rolled to the side. Her left eye was fixed in place during our conversations as she ladled out the borscht with beans I ordered every day. And every day, I’d wait to see it slip away—the whiteness, the angle, the variation: the hand wants to draw it. If that which is beautiful is balanced and symmetrical, a “pleasing unity,” then the unbeautiful’s more a form of interruption—like a gasp. A catch in breath. The unbeautiful’s a form made of interruptions—a rough hand passed over wool’s nap, snagging. And passed over again and again for the snag. It’s a moment that catches your attention. It’s a moment into which you fall, as when on a crowded bus, hot crowded subway, you forget yourself and enter some other, less populated world by an unexpected door: a woman’s earlobe, deeply notched; the close back of a man’s neck, oily and creased; a girl’s cracked lip; a freckle; a boil; a split thumbnail with its crescent of dirt, next to which your own nail rests on the cool, aluminum pole.
Recurrences/Concurrences
C
onditions are present.
onditions are present.
Frost on the bathroom window this morning burgeons and twines in winged fleurs-de-lis. Astonishing frost on this, the same morning I discover my mother’s old cigarette case: the same, precise blooms but in silver-etched motion. How the mind of frost, the form reaches out, draws its heirs close: from anywhere, cracked riverbeds and leaf-veins in sun. From a few blocks away, wrought-iron fish on the Roland Park schoolyard fence. From childhood, Dead Man’s Fingers,
Codium fragile
, common seaweed, washed up on any Long Island beach.
Codium fragile
, common seaweed, washed up on any Long Island beach.
And this afternoon, sitting down to work, a plastic bag catches in a bare tree and stays. I can see it from up here, from my second floor window. Up here, it’s Baltimore. The middle of winter. But I know this thing, puffed full of air, the four corners taut, is a swollen egg case, a skate’s or a ray’s:
Mermaid’s Purse
we’d find at low tide, shining and black and tangled on shore.
Mermaid’s Purse
we’d find at low tide, shining and black and tangled on shore.
Forms everywhere watch and align.
I once had a friend. He had been teaching a long time when I was just starting. He liked telling his students he’d seen them before. In another life, at another school, the same hairline, the same kid brother back home in eighth grade. In class, he gave them obituaries to read. And though we’re no longer close, here is consolation: I still believe in what he was up to: seeing if he could make them dizzy. Suggesting they write their way into or out of the disquieting facts he offered up. Offering the chance to find themselves breathless, to consider themselves a point on a circle falling and rising, falling/drawn up, as the wheel moved, moves, is moving relentlessly on. He wanted them to feel
conveyor
beneath their feet, when all along they’d assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.
conveyor
beneath their feet, when all along they’d assumed they were walking. To consider they might, somehow, for another, be a mark and a measure of vastness. A site.
As he was for me.
What do you see? What aligns?
he’s still asking.
he’s still asking.
Fronds of frost. Crystallized leaves. Ironwork, sterling, the form recurring. In Belgian lace, threaded with light. In Russian tea glasses, the filigree heated by steaming, sweet amber. In coral arms. In branching veins.
In this way I begin to speak to him. Slant and sidelong.
A path through this thinking is clearing. Stay with me. Events will fit themselves to themselves. Stitch along and proceed.
Without the site of this essay, these moments are nowhere. And Reader, without you, this reflection on things remaking themselves—fern into ice, ice into sea plant, faces and lives over time—is unseen.
Stay with me.
What about this: these moments of recurrence/concurrence are not messages fluttering toward, bearing secrets, but stories in which we are part of the telling. We are, for a spell, of the path where shape forms, where flux assembles, briefly, a center.
And there are so many centers.
What does this sound like:
Where I held my finger to the window and warmed a small circle in frost this morning, a new flower has grown. The new flower began in the shape of a star.
Codium fragile.
Silver-leaved. I am only writing what is true—true to form—when I say the flower, whose fronds are in motion, grew from a star. To say every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal, to say that the star’s disappearance, ongoing, is what we see looking up at night—sounds unbelievable.
Codium fragile.
Silver-leaved. I am only writing what is true—true to form—when I say the flower, whose fronds are in motion, grew from a star. To say every scrap of matter bears a trace of the beginning of the universe, that a star lives in our blood, a star with its fingers in the riverbed of our bloodstream, tributaries, filigree, silver-etched, is a fern, an ice crystal, to say that the star’s disappearance, ongoing, is what we see looking up at night—sounds unbelievable.
This sounds unbelievable.
But sitting down to this work, this work, too, seems unlikely: that particulars mingle, particulars assert, conspire, assemble. That what I didn’t know I knew was
somewhere
. . . waters be gathered, waters bring forth . . . and how, what seems in the end like intention, arrives only piecemeal. How what seems in the end
inevitable
, is a trail of particulars finding each other.
somewhere
. . . waters be gathered, waters bring forth . . . and how, what seems in the end like intention, arrives only piecemeal. How what seems in the end
inevitable
, is a trail of particulars finding each other.
Of course, I could say
I won’t write about my old friend.
And, to be honest, I’d rather not, since I still feel regret and sadness about that loss. But things about him assert here as subject. The obituaries (you’ll see). The dizziness. His belief in the uneasy matter of chaos. It’s all, here, important. All-of-a-piece. These lightest of strands, moments, memories unbury. Forms align in each others’ presence.
I won’t write about my old friend.
And, to be honest, I’d rather not, since I still feel regret and sadness about that loss. But things about him assert here as subject. The obituaries (you’ll see). The dizziness. His belief in the uneasy matter of chaos. It’s all, here, important. All-of-a-piece. These lightest of strands, moments, memories unbury. Forms align in each others’ presence.
It’s the noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.
Shows we’re in use.
Uses us.
Right now. Right this minute.
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