Read Rough Likeness: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
Rough Likeness: Essays (17 page)
Today at lunch there were many things to attend. That your mother-in-law was unsteady and needed a napkin looked very much like my scarf askew, my too-heavy groceries, some shingles to nail, some compost to pitch. Tasks unfolded. Time got all wavy and particulate at once. It settled. And didn’t it unsettle, too.
It made me rub my eyes and blink.
Let me give you this:
That you looked at your mother-in-law, as you must every day, looked right at her and made her thus real, as anyone is more real when seen and attended; that you kept seeing her back into herself, whoever she was, or was just then becoming.
On Tools
That wood won’t work. It was chainsawed roughly by someone who had no eye for logs, and now it can’t be split. It’s piled by the side of the road in squat disks like kinged checkers, game over. I myself do not cut wood, but review this situation through the eyes of a friend whose pretty impressive woodpile I’ve seen in a photo he sent. All that wood stacked against the shed—
enough for a winter
, I guessed.
Six cords,
he refined. Later came the word
limb
(as a verb) in conversation. And when I said “ax” and he corrected with “maul” (not really a minor adjustment), choice emerged, the field of cutting enlarged and was no longer the simple stock act of cartoons.
Hatchet
arose. I imagined the restive, neatly hung options lining the shed in the photo. (“Splitting mauls come in four-pound increments: eight, twelve, sixteen—mine is sixteen; between maul and ax, the ax is more versatile: slimmer, lighter, sharper.... A maul doesn’t have to be very sharp. It doesn’t cut, it just pries,” he writes, going on about functions and choices, since I asked.)
enough for a winter
, I guessed.
Six cords,
he refined. Later came the word
limb
(as a verb) in conversation. And when I said “ax” and he corrected with “maul” (not really a minor adjustment), choice emerged, the field of cutting enlarged and was no longer the simple stock act of cartoons.
Hatchet
arose. I imagined the restive, neatly hung options lining the shed in the photo. (“Splitting mauls come in four-pound increments: eight, twelve, sixteen—mine is sixteen; between maul and ax, the ax is more versatile: slimmer, lighter, sharper.... A maul doesn’t have to be very sharp. It doesn’t cut, it just pries,” he writes, going on about functions and choices, since I asked.)
I started to notice my neighbors’ woodpiles, the good, precise stacks and the teetery ones; that people use bins, frames, or canvas haulers; supply varies greatly, from modest stacks for the occasional fire to piles for serious heating; kids mess up the piles substantially, borrowing for clubhouses and skateboard jumps. Here in Baltimore, wood arrives by delivery in fall and sits at the curb until people get around to stacking on weekends.
But about those sharp
quarter rounds
(the novice’s love of new words in the mouth):
someone
made them happen. If I stick with this a little longer, I might have a chance, in conversation, to use the phrase
put up wood
(like
put up preserves
) now that I know that’s what you call it. And with more time still, I could memorize which wood contains the most BTUs per cord, though I’m finding no helpful acronym for (starting with the highest density) Oak, Ash, Maple, Birch, Poplar, Aspen, Pine.
quarter rounds
(the novice’s love of new words in the mouth):
someone
made them happen. If I stick with this a little longer, I might have a chance, in conversation, to use the phrase
put up wood
(like
put up preserves
) now that I know that’s what you call it. And with more time still, I could memorize which wood contains the most BTUs per cord, though I’m finding no helpful acronym for (starting with the highest density) Oak, Ash, Maple, Birch, Poplar, Aspen, Pine.
Recently I had a chance to try it myself. It wasn’t complicated and I pretty much managed, but awkwardly. My musculature isn’t trained for the task; nothing in my body’s habituated that way. If I had a reason to practice splitting (like, say, a fireplace) I might become good. But my arcs through air were all a mess. I couldn’t control the ax very well—it kept wobbling out of the orbit I intended. The handle felt too long and unbalanced and I couldn’t find the space in air that opened for the blade. I suspect that when you’re on, there’s a groove the blade remembers, and a fissile core awaiting release that calls the right motion down.
Sometimes I look at people (or read certain books) and think (not unkindly, just with disappointment):
oh, a first-time gesture
—say, at a state fair, at one of those booths where guys try to impress their girlfriends by swinging a mock but heavy sledgehammer that, if landed hard enough on the little pad, raises a lever, mercury-in-a-thermometer style, and hits a red bell at the top. Such gestures are clumsy and haven’t yet found even a jerky-effective method. They’re all just sloppy force asserted. Every now and then someone comes by and it’s clear, you can see: he actually
does
this in the course of a day. The language is there, the movements (both the transitional and the primary) are refined or quirky; either way, a system has been worked out. (Of course the carnie running the game can nail the spot and ring the bell, over and over, though he isn’t a big guy; he just knows the sweet place, wherever it is, off-center or flat-on. He swings his rubbery sledgehammer up, lets it hang at the zenith just for a second, then the weight of the head angles into its practiced fall. You can’t help but envy the guy. The mild, egressive
huh
of breath, how he seems to both find and create the arc, invisible to others. His ease is seductive and even if he
is
reeky, stuporous, snarly, even if swindle underscores his flattery—
come on, big guy, try for the lady
—I fall a little for him; for the forms of effort naturalized, for the fluencies his body knows just the occasion for.)
oh, a first-time gesture
—say, at a state fair, at one of those booths where guys try to impress their girlfriends by swinging a mock but heavy sledgehammer that, if landed hard enough on the little pad, raises a lever, mercury-in-a-thermometer style, and hits a red bell at the top. Such gestures are clumsy and haven’t yet found even a jerky-effective method. They’re all just sloppy force asserted. Every now and then someone comes by and it’s clear, you can see: he actually
does
this in the course of a day. The language is there, the movements (both the transitional and the primary) are refined or quirky; either way, a system has been worked out. (Of course the carnie running the game can nail the spot and ring the bell, over and over, though he isn’t a big guy; he just knows the sweet place, wherever it is, off-center or flat-on. He swings his rubbery sledgehammer up, lets it hang at the zenith just for a second, then the weight of the head angles into its practiced fall. You can’t help but envy the guy. The mild, egressive
huh
of breath, how he seems to both find and create the arc, invisible to others. His ease is seductive and even if he
is
reeky, stuporous, snarly, even if swindle underscores his flattery—
come on, big guy, try for the lady
—I fall a little for him; for the forms of effort naturalized, for the fluencies his body knows just the occasion for.)
A tool can so easily be considered wrong or broken (or rigged, if you’re in a bad mood at a fair) until one knows how to use it well (finds a grip, a stance that suits, shifts into a callused spot, performs a three-step predance move, swipes a forehead free of sweat). Or it might be considered too heavy when it’s not too heavy at all (you just need the recursive angle, and to waggle into the vector that wants you, sidelong or square-on, etc., depending entirely on the way you’re keyed to gravity). You might consider the material you’re working on bad, rank, unyielding, anomic, unless you come to know its very particular features, which means you can look like a regular person, walking, say, down 5
th
Avenue in New York but at the same time recite, if called upon to do so, very solid facts about a tool and its use. People who know such stuff, who possess a sensitivity to tools and to the way jobs like to be done, think of such things as daily, as rote, what you learned as a kid. Just work. See below, from a very long letter on wood from the friend who indulges my interest in woodpiles:
th
Avenue in New York but at the same time recite, if called upon to do so, very solid facts about a tool and its use. People who know such stuff, who possess a sensitivity to tools and to the way jobs like to be done, think of such things as daily, as rote, what you learned as a kid. Just work. See below, from a very long letter on wood from the friend who indulges my interest in woodpiles:
Ponderosa pine, unless it’s knotty, splits in clean, straight lines, one swing of the maul, usually. A knot is merely
1
a branch that started when the tree was young, near the center, and grew outward with the tree so that it interrupts the grain of the wood with a cross-directional grain and serves to bind the log together. Some wood has crooked grains—cottonwood, Siberian elm—and is so difficult to split I don’t bother to cut it. But if a maul doesn’t work, you can go to a wedge,
2
which is a slug of metal about a foot long widening from bottom to top that you drive with a sledgehammer. If you try to use a splitting maul on too-knotty/crooked/ grained wood, it never penetrates the fibers far enough to split and you can hit all day and never manage it.
3
Ash is more difficult than pine, but usually straight-grained, so it may resist the first stroke
4
and maybe the second, but then suddenly breaks apart. Since oak is the hardest wood, if you get a piece where the grain runs in spirals,
5
it may take a dozen blows
6
to drive even a wedge far enough in to separate the stump. (No wonder the oak creaks so. The fibers make these small internal noises, so much quieter than the metal-on-metal hammer blow, so much more expressive.)
If you know your stuff, as my friend does, you get to ponder the dialects of wood; you get to put things together about certain fibers being expressive—and that gets to be offhand, parenthetical. Such thoughts are embellishments, and intimacies. Footnotes show discipleship, the drive to get to the bottom of, the urge to make a path by which one comes to inhabit an idea for herself. Inside those parentheses though, a person who knows stuff stops for a minute, reviews the familiar scene afresh. Finds all that he didn’t know he knew. Reflects. Surprises himself. Gets, as is often said about such moments of flight and discovery,
poetic
.
poetic
.
Shit’s Beautiful
I don’t mean this groovily, as in “wow dude, a lot of goodness out there,” or as a reprieve (“it could’ve been a bad scene, but I woke up feeling fine”) or as an exhortation to a sad friend to come on and snap out of it. I mean nothing existential, collective, abstract. I mean, exactly, yours and mine.
I hardly know where to start, in praise.
How about with the functioning system: the grinding, lubricating, and dissolving of food en route to the stomach, set below densities of liver and pancreas; the embellishment of gall bladder (branching like a tethered cloud) and appendix (brief, floating archipelago); the large and small intestines folding, switchbacking, before the sideroom of bladder, all ending in the neat funnel of anus. And the systems of deconstructions
,
mixing, moving, separating, reducing, so as to build anew; nerves instructing muscles to swallow; storage facilities tucked and filling; enzymes and hormones triggering motion/reestablishing stasis; mucosae protecting; vast surfaces of villi absorbing nutrients; and the recognition systems for starch, sugar, fiber, protein, fat, vitamins, salt, and water, each at their appointed moment, extracting, contributing. The final secreting, compacting, and binding. The folds, slopes, and lobes in consort. The duties prescribed. The sequences ordered, so extrusions of matter are detoxified, synthesized, and rolled out in shapes that mimic the form of the body that made them in wellness—the system, the whole, a marvel of containment and timing. Such matter compelled through a body, such abundantly motile matter passing the retiary, the loci, the conundra of folds and slopes and lobes: an amazement.
,
mixing, moving, separating, reducing, so as to build anew; nerves instructing muscles to swallow; storage facilities tucked and filling; enzymes and hormones triggering motion/reestablishing stasis; mucosae protecting; vast surfaces of villi absorbing nutrients; and the recognition systems for starch, sugar, fiber, protein, fat, vitamins, salt, and water, each at their appointed moment, extracting, contributing. The final secreting, compacting, and binding. The folds, slopes, and lobes in consort. The duties prescribed. The sequences ordered, so extrusions of matter are detoxified, synthesized, and rolled out in shapes that mimic the form of the body that made them in wellness—the system, the whole, a marvel of containment and timing. Such matter compelled through a body, such abundantly motile matter passing the retiary, the loci, the conundra of folds and slopes and lobes: an amazement.
I’m going to work on the elegance of shit. Why can’t it be so? The compact forms expressive, responsive—as architect Louis Sullivan wrote, “A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.”
Indeed, it’s hard to know the wealth you’re born into, until it’s compromised or taken away. Until the crash comes, the doors close, and gates seal against you, the comings and goings no longer freely, unthinkingly performed.
I’m not the kind of person, who, coming home, can’t wait to get into her sweats. I’m not a comfy, earth-mother type (though I do make granola and sometimes bread.) In fact, I’d be happy to disappear now and not have you consider my body at all, but since it’s my sole point of reference, let me say without too much embellishment: the system, shut down, is a nightmare of ceasings. If you haven’t encountered the language yet, it goes
varices, tears, inflammations, fissures. Ruptures. Bleeding (internal and ex-).
And for others, it’s
pouchings, cramps, kinks, misrouted fluids, excessive trapped air,
even
auto-immunological destruction
.
varices, tears, inflammations, fissures. Ruptures. Bleeding (internal and ex-).
And for others, it’s
pouchings, cramps, kinks, misrouted fluids, excessive trapped air,
even
auto-immunological destruction
.
But in the presense of order and balance, when controls persist and mechanisms of transmission maintain and adjust, divide and release, when the billions and billions of microvilli sway and stir for nutrients, when your own two to three gallons of food and liquid process down to a mere twelve ounces of waste a day—what you’re left with is shit. I use the unlovely word for it. Of course, there is no lovely word (though we have in abundance the clinical and cloying), but neither am I shying from this one, all the better to force the issue—resistance—into view. All systems in accord—spit, knock wood—what’s left is the body’s decision: that’s enough, and good-bye to the rest, to all we don’t need, that, nevertheless, like the sturdiest bridge, the fiftieth sketch, made a path to the moment where the best has been culled, the excess released, all that lent itself in right measure, let go.
I think I have a well-developed sense of modesty. I wear a bathrobe (embroidered with dragons, okay, but still:
coverage)
. I don’t wear the low-cut, the too-tight to work. This foray into shit is not about
letting it all hang out
as people used to say. It’s that gratitude makes a body earnest in its expression:
“Blessed are you, The Architect... who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known . . . that if one of these passageways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. . . .”
So goes the morning blessing in the Jewish prayer book: that we might appreciate health in its presence, not only in its absence.
coverage)
. I don’t wear the low-cut, the too-tight to work. This foray into shit is not about
letting it all hang out
as people used to say. It’s that gratitude makes a body earnest in its expression:
“Blessed are you, The Architect... who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known . . . that if one of these passageways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. . . .”
So goes the morning blessing in the Jewish prayer book: that we might appreciate health in its presence, not only in its absence.
Consider the weird pleasure of eating durians, natto, fermented shark—things custardy-rotten, ammonia-preserved, softened and richening in their decay. The
haut goût
of game, the
faisande—
that quality, ripeness, character so few foods offer today. The pleasure in a chunk of Pont-l’Évêque, of Pié d’Angloys, of Époisses (fantastic—and banned from all public transport in France). A smear of Taleggio on good, hard bread is a training in complexity. We train for complexity on the way
in
, the scents reinterpreted, overriden, desire teased onto a certain lane, the unlikely thing sought, carefully tended, dosed out on special occasions. About such tastes my son once asked: why in life do we avoid them and in cheese actually want them? About madness I recently read: “Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen—a force that both chastened and exalted her.” Chastened /exalted—what a fragile state, the awful and ecstatic a tremor apart, the line between them scoured away by the strange light they share. Such delicacies are specially plated, kept apart from other tastes. Priced for discerning
.
Rare. Seasonal. Cultivated. Strange.
haut goût
of game, the
faisande—
that quality, ripeness, character so few foods offer today. The pleasure in a chunk of Pont-l’Évêque, of Pié d’Angloys, of Époisses (fantastic—and banned from all public transport in France). A smear of Taleggio on good, hard bread is a training in complexity. We train for complexity on the way
in
, the scents reinterpreted, overriden, desire teased onto a certain lane, the unlikely thing sought, carefully tended, dosed out on special occasions. About such tastes my son once asked: why in life do we avoid them and in cheese actually want them? About madness I recently read: “Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen—a force that both chastened and exalted her.” Chastened /exalted—what a fragile state, the awful and ecstatic a tremor apart, the line between them scoured away by the strange light they share. Such delicacies are specially plated, kept apart from other tastes. Priced for discerning
.
Rare. Seasonal. Cultivated. Strange.
Other books
The War Gate by Chris Stevenson
Shadows at Stonewylde by Kit Berry
Last Night by Meryl Sawyer
Rhonda+Nelson+-+The+Soldier by Unknown
Unforgettable (The Dalton Gang #3) by Alison Kent
Blood and Salt by Kim Liggett
Street Game by Christine Feehan
Winter Howl (Sanctuary) by Evans, Aurelia T.
Personal Experiences by Tracy Lee
Gentleman Captain by J. D. Davies
