On Looking: Essays (16 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
I play the hand-over-hand game with my son. He is three.
What can I be when I am older?
(Anything you want.)
Maybe an artist and I can still live with you?
(Of course, of course.) We take turns hiding, revealing, and slapping our hands back down to the kitchen table. His hand is a weight and a fragility. Here and gone. For long, heavy months I was filled and waiting, and then, once I held him, the loss rushed in: first he will be here and then he will not. First he is with me—and then
I
am the fragility. Here and then gone. For now, we slap our hands down, faster and faster and pull them away, down and away, down and away. We make a blur of our hands and we laugh about it.
What can I be when I am older?
(Anything you want.)
Maybe an artist and I can still live with you?
(Of course, of course.) We take turns hiding, revealing, and slapping our hands back down to the kitchen table. His hand is a weight and a fragility. Here and gone. For long, heavy months I was filled and waiting, and then, once I held him, the loss rushed in: first he will be here and then he will not. First he is with me—and then
I
am the fragility. Here and then gone. For now, we slap our hands down, faster and faster and pull them away, down and away, down and away. We make a blur of our hands and we laugh about it.
Once I looked in the mirror and saw—not a thing. So I made of my arm a sketchy ladder and climbed the pain up. I reeled myself into quietude. The pain was there, but the pain was good. It framed my body and held it still, until I could find myself again.
I walk down to the lake, to the spot under trees, to the open space between overturned boats again. In this dusty place, a water snake sat coiled in sun like a vine, like a belt, tense arm, long shadow, and (thought through the ages, not mine alone)
excrement
. I stay a moment then slip away, quietly, that the snake might return, that it might be seen, oh let it be seen, dull, vicious, and coiled. Let it disgust and surprise someone else.
excrement
. I stay a moment then slip away, quietly, that the snake might return, that it might be seen, oh let it be seen, dull, vicious, and coiled. Let it disgust and surprise someone else.
On Praise
M
y friend went down in a ditch of his own devising. A week later, dirty and stronger, he emerged, and we stood, none of us ditch-diggers, at the edge of the hole he made for a sewerline, like a route, from street to house. “Nice hole,” the others said, but I was thinking how good it must have been, by this labor, to lower yourself into the ground to be held by the ground. How good, for a change, to stop and lean against the wall of your own work and measure with your body the achievement and the depth. With shoulders, keep even the width of the ditch. And resting, but not idly, take the earth between your fingers and roll your material to powder. Grind it between your teeth. Find it along the river of your spine.
y friend went down in a ditch of his own devising. A week later, dirty and stronger, he emerged, and we stood, none of us ditch-diggers, at the edge of the hole he made for a sewerline, like a route, from street to house. “Nice hole,” the others said, but I was thinking how good it must have been, by this labor, to lower yourself into the ground to be held by the ground. How good, for a change, to stop and lean against the wall of your own work and measure with your body the achievement and the depth. With shoulders, keep even the width of the ditch. And resting, but not idly, take the earth between your fingers and roll your material to powder. Grind it between your teeth. Find it along the river of your spine.
I did not want to say, to have to say I was impressed—though for the sake of others standing and admiring, and convention, I agreed. No one digs his own ditch these days. But praise for your effort called up an emptiness. And hearing the word aloud, “impressed,” an insufficiency. Because I know the way you work, stringing ligatures, stooping and rising with skeins and emulsions, with calipers of your own fashioning, cracking densities, minting and hoisting, probing and rowing toward. I know your precisely headlong way with undertakings: elsewhere, on a page. In a summer yard blackened with sour cherries. Photographing the cherries.
Praise referred not at all to the line you plotted, cast ahead, and kept in mind, descending. Praise could not reach the moment when, sticky and hot and pausing to drink, looking down at your hands gone chalky with dirt, they were anyone’s hands. Praise called forth nothing about the stone in your shoe, kept in to sharpen, to pare a thought clean, to accompany so much methodical bending and lifting. Stone to refine the humidity. Stone of clarion pinch and private measure of resolve.
From the edge of the finished hole, looking in, I saw instead the story of your work: at the start, how shallow the roots of grass, and stubborn the mat of their underground twining. The way each new task required courting, appeared resistant, at first refused to unlock the sweet, rote place where the patterns are. You’d learn, by working, how a shovel favors one spot until you angle it away from the pull of the known. You’d find a way to concentrate force into essential gesture. There was stopping to dig around outcrops; stopping to pack and smooth the sides: decisions made with earth and body.
I could see the way the material, carefully attended, settled into coherence: by midday the ground resists; after rain there’s slippage to skirt or shore up. At night, how many bricks (test wind, anticipate) to use to tack the sky-blue tarp.
And the rhythms found, each day, anew:
plunge and toss,
or
plunge and lift and toss,
two beats or three, according to the form’s—your work’s—requirement.
plunge and toss,
or
plunge and lift and toss,
two beats or three, according to the form’s—your work’s—requirement.
Proof that muscle compasses both rootedness and torque.
And there must have been songs—lines repeating, refrains cantilevering your swing. And, too, at rest after working all day, how the body goes on humming.
I stood over your work and spoke a few words—though not because you required, instead of my silence, any affirmation. I admire the way you’ve routed that, almost, from your expectations, how it’s nice when it comes, and desire for it flares, I know, but my praise didn’t mean much, much after it was spoken, right? Because, better than that, being down in a hole, day after day, one learns the hydrostatic difference between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. angles of light, and notes them, and works right through. Knowing nothing at first about the work before you, then finding the patterns it requires—that’s what matters.
I know that about you.
And there was the slow rise or sharp clutch of gratitude—I’m guessing, but I think this is right—for the way a body keeps on strengthening. I’m sure there were long stretches of unencumbered joy in the arc and bend and heft of the heavy work, but better still, there was that paradox to hold: the ease of being strong and alive right up against the lousy habits you persist with, the damage you do, that, miracle, isn’t more apparent in the body.
There would have been the shifting scents of uppermost dry, tufted browns gone to red and mustardy clays. Angles by which a tool comes to be known: the primary- and the relief-hold, and the smooth shifts between them so natural by the end of the week. And nicks in the blade—this from the first hard crack against quartz; this where you dulled the tip against the boxwood’s roots. Blade worn like a pedal where you pushed with your boot. Dark stain on the wooden grip, salted by your hand.
We sit on your porch having a drink. Here, tilted into a corner, is your shovel. Now, weeks after the ditch has been filled, is hay-covered and settling, and your daughter runs right over it, laughing, you’re thinking fast, fleet as the myth’s terrible moment when the earth opens up and all the mortal bargaining begins. Here, gathered on the porch with us, you’re staying with that gash of a moment, you’re holding, somewhere, a starkness few will let a moment turn to.
You’re turning the moment in your hands, you’re offering it so it breaks in the light and falls in shining disks and you harvest the disks, unseen, and again your hands are remade, and you fill your pockets and jingle the pockets.
Words for this are warming. Rolling between your fingers.
And how would the praise for that go:
“Good awe?” “Congrats?”
“Good awe?” “Congrats?”
For the well-tempered shock of being here, each clay-filled, light-plumbed moment ongoing, transparent, and loved:
“well done?”
“well done?”
On Not Hurting a Fly: A Memorial
. . . fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement . . . a piece of the body torn out by the root might be more to the point.
—James Agee
I
’d like to look at the issue seriously, since I’ve got a fly here and it’s past being hurt; since, now that I’m looking, it’s really a horsefly I smacked against the window weeks ago. A
horsefly
, which means I’ve stopped to ask questions. A horsefly, making the scene specific, just right for this discussion.
’d like to look at the issue seriously, since I’ve got a fly here and it’s past being hurt; since, now that I’m looking, it’s really a horsefly I smacked against the window weeks ago. A
horsefly
, which means I’ve stopped to ask questions. A horsefly, making the scene specific, just right for this discussion.
Why haven’t I cleared it away? Like an old hurt or slight, it has softened and darkened, curled in upon itself. Small presence at the edge of sight, in a spot of sun. Sometimes when I’m working these days, deeply working, I’ll glance down at my watch and see only ciphers, as if the numbers, worn smooth and blank as river stones, had nothing to do with time—or as much to do with it as the grainy whorls in this desk, distant, unreadable now. I go back to work, head bent, caught up in the moment, unmarked.
In the past few weeks I’ve overlooked the fly as if it, too, were a cipher, a nick in the sill, or a small, indigenous dropped thing: an acorn, a seed pod half-hidden in brush. I’ve grown accustomed to it, just off to the side, bent into the shape of a comma, half-stasis, brief pause before continuing on.
Here is a joke: a priest, a minister, and a rabbi are asked what they would hope to hear at their funerals. The priest hopes to learn he was a spiritual leader of great comfort to his parishioners; the minister hopes it might be said that he inspired many to a life of service and godliness. The rabbi, when asked, hopes someone will say “Hey, wait! I think I saw him move!”
Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I think I see the fly move. Even after so many weeks. Because its body remains, I startle first and ask questions later. Because the fly has grown porous by now, and brittle, the softest breeze sifts its papery wings. The air, passing over like a gaze, enlivens, inhabits, suggests.
This summer I met someone who kept a jar of dead flies on his porch. Whenever he found one he put it in; it took only a month or so to fill the jar completely up. He’s a remarkable person who had a frightening childhood—though I doubt this has anything to do with the flies. He just seems to like clean, uncluttered surroundings. I want to emphasize again that he doesn’t kill the flies and isn’t trying to build a collection. But there they were on the little table, contained and ready for easy observation, the jar organizational, a place to keep things-of-a-kind as he kept papers filed, books neatly stacked. By midsummer when the jar was full, the bodies were beginning to compact, the whole mass settling like a snarl of hair. I wondered what the effect of a jar of dragonflies would be, the lace of their wings complicating the scene, making the ravaging more useless still. Why crush, even in death, the dragonfly that eats mosquitoes, gnats, and moths and does not bite us? Whose head is nearly covered with eyes, whose wings are sheer, as fragile as tatting, and beat a hundred times a second. Whose body is emerald, periwinkle, cobalt—electric colors of a falling sky.
(Though of course the bumblebee, too, is beautiful: ample and furred. And cicadas are airborne, humming spectra. And aphids weigh not even a breath, and potato beetles outshine anthracite in sun. . . .)
Have you heard this before: war does not kill thousands of people; one person dies thousands of times?
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