On Looking: Essays (17 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
That at last count there were 59,939 names engraved on the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.?
I’ve always been puzzled by the phrase “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.” It never-minds the effort required to actually swat a fly, and moreover, the fly becomes a wee, small thing to which no harm should come. Speaking the words, one suspends one’s feelings about the fly—a droning, disease-carrying, nerve-rattling pest. Meaning fractures. The fly stands in for “a thing not to be hurt,” corresponds not at all to our perception.
That is, we disembody it.
I have a friend who won’t swat even mosquitoes, though he, too, gets bitten. It’s as if his capacity for annoyance has simply run out, or perhaps he has run it out of his body. He focuses a placid eye on the world, exists in quiet brotherhood with all things and so mosquitoes don’t distract him any more than the bitter cold of winter and heat of summer he works through, doing all kinds of jobs. He drives a pickup truck all over town. Once I found a chipmunk he hit and killed on the road.
And so, because of what his regret would be; because the animal was completely flattened, its body a pool for ants in the heat; because I will never tell him I saw the eyes aligned on a single plane, the mouth open and grains of teeth pressed like a zipper into the earth; for the time it takes to see the things in front of me; for the whorls in the table I work on, for the nicks and gouges, rings and years, erasures and grime—I will look again at the fly on the sill:
its three-part body. Its pair of wings and sets of legs—six haired legs that end in claws—attached to the center segment. Its shovel-like mouthparts. Its hard outer covering. A black that, back-lit at the end of the day, is flecked with furred gold. Enormous, multiple eyes-in-a-grid the size of its head (I used a magnifying glass) and the hairlike antennae between its eyes.
I am following the body back to itself. From mouthpart to head, down-sloping to wings, my looking moves moebus-like over the joints and segments, the sharp parts, the soft transparencies.
The wings askew. The missing leg.
And though I failed to see it at first,
thanks
now to the body, its constancy. Though I let it wait and it waited, dependable matter. Thanks to the wings, which are gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries. Thanks to the bead of its head, the bristles and faceted eyes like velvet. Thanks to the body for permitting return to what I once knew urgently:
thanks
now to the body, its constancy. Though I let it wait and it waited, dependable matter. Thanks to the wings, which are gently veined like a fine pen drawing of tributaries. Thanks to the bead of its head, the bristles and faceted eyes like velvet. Thanks to the body for permitting return to what I once knew urgently:
her body is mine.
1972. I saw the burning girl, stilled on TV, motionless, running, running and crying, and knew that was me in Vietnam. I knew as I ran to the kitchen and pressed my face to the cool, pearly snaps on my mother’s jeans as she washed the dishes, and I couldn’t speak—I knew I was burning on TV. The flames were behind me, were black and white and I was stilled and I was running, my clothes gone and it was snowing on TV, though it was summer and I was breathless and sweating.
1972. I saw the burning girl, stilled on TV, motionless, running, running and crying, and knew that was me in Vietnam. I knew as I ran to the kitchen and pressed my face to the cool, pearly snaps on my mother’s jeans as she washed the dishes, and I couldn’t speak—I knew I was burning on TV. The flames were behind me, were black and white and I was stilled and I was running, my clothes gone and it was snowing on TV, though it was summer and I was breathless and sweating.
That was Kim Phuc and we were almost nine years old.
I’m following the body.
At the Vietnam War Memorial my finger traces, from my hometown,
Howard Martin Gerstel.
That stands for his body.
(Jewish, Married,
I look up.
Casualty Type: Hostile, Gun, Small Arms Fire, Ground Casualty.
) I loop around the letters . . . I was three when he was killed. I was four when Robert George Hufschmid, also from my town,
Married, Catholic,
died:
Hostile, Artillery Rocket, Mortar, Ground Casualty.
Four when my uncle, in the Peace Corps instead, raising chickens in southern India, nearly died of measles. I ask him about the year, exactly, because my son is four now. Because his body is still of my body, and we go on like this, daily, my arms containing the smallness he makes of himself when he curls in my lap. My arms around him, bracketing him, enclosing the ribs and the taut, delicate skin between them. Though I know it will not go on like this always.
Howard Martin Gerstel.
That stands for his body.
(Jewish, Married,
I look up.
Casualty Type: Hostile, Gun, Small Arms Fire, Ground Casualty.
) I loop around the letters . . . I was three when he was killed. I was four when Robert George Hufschmid, also from my town,
Married, Catholic,
died:
Hostile, Artillery Rocket, Mortar, Ground Casualty.
Four when my uncle, in the Peace Corps instead, raising chickens in southern India, nearly died of measles. I ask him about the year, exactly, because my son is four now. Because his body is still of my body, and we go on like this, daily, my arms containing the smallness he makes of himself when he curls in my lap. My arms around him, bracketing him, enclosing the ribs and the taut, delicate skin between them. Though I know it will not go on like this always.
“It goes on,” I say,
“forever,”
when I first see the wall. But it’s not forever and I am annoyed at my own hyperbole. It’s only enormous, a cut, polished edge that holds the earth back. The wall starts in the ground, reaches an apex and narrows down, something like an open book propped on the belly of earth. As we pass, our bodies are reflected in the black, buffed surface. It looks like a printer’s case gone wild, kicked and reset, as the eye blurs over so many names. There are the ancient ones: Ham. Abel. Isaiah. Behind the memorial, maples reach with their colors; it’s a bright November day. The names rise above our heads as we walk down, down imperceptibly, as if into a tomb. Visitors rub the names onto paper the concession guys give out for free. Circle the names with their fingers and hands, sit and stare and tell their stories. Tell their kids “Hal commanded D company.” Israel. Samuel. And as you ascend, the names trickle to a close at the wall’s far point. The names of the dead are the names of the living and in that way, too, go on: Herrera, my friend in California. Figueroa, my friend in New York. Carotenuto, my student. Boudreau, my old art teacher. Schwartzkopf. Kennedy. Abraham. Jeremiah. People take pictures of everything, even the phonebook-sized map of the names’ locations, home towns, and dates of death. Therein are the places of my life, too: Hewlett, Oberlin, Iowa City, Baltimore. It takes me no time to find my birthday, and it is no one’s death day.
“forever,”
when I first see the wall. But it’s not forever and I am annoyed at my own hyperbole. It’s only enormous, a cut, polished edge that holds the earth back. The wall starts in the ground, reaches an apex and narrows down, something like an open book propped on the belly of earth. As we pass, our bodies are reflected in the black, buffed surface. It looks like a printer’s case gone wild, kicked and reset, as the eye blurs over so many names. There are the ancient ones: Ham. Abel. Isaiah. Behind the memorial, maples reach with their colors; it’s a bright November day. The names rise above our heads as we walk down, down imperceptibly, as if into a tomb. Visitors rub the names onto paper the concession guys give out for free. Circle the names with their fingers and hands, sit and stare and tell their stories. Tell their kids “Hal commanded D company.” Israel. Samuel. And as you ascend, the names trickle to a close at the wall’s far point. The names of the dead are the names of the living and in that way, too, go on: Herrera, my friend in California. Figueroa, my friend in New York. Carotenuto, my student. Boudreau, my old art teacher. Schwartzkopf. Kennedy. Abraham. Jeremiah. People take pictures of everything, even the phonebook-sized map of the names’ locations, home towns, and dates of death. Therein are the places of my life, too: Hewlett, Oberlin, Iowa City, Baltimore. It takes me no time to find my birthday, and it is no one’s death day.
The pamphlet I picked up says “By virtue of its design, the memorial puts a human face on a divisive conflict.”
But there are no faces here at all. Or the faces are fleet, sheerest outlines we conjure back into mind. Private faces. Singular faces. Except as metaphor, war—conflict—does not wear a face.
Yes, stories come back.
Stories kindle forth a moment.
But that’s not the body.
And neither are the figurative women, bronzed, in the Women’s Vietnam Memorial, bodies. They are larger than life, in the posture of
tending. Pained
by the soldiers in their arms, dying. They lean like italics into the virtues they mean to portray:
bravery, duty, compassion.
tending. Pained
by the soldiers in their arms, dying. They lean like italics into the virtues they mean to portray:
bravery, duty, compassion.
But that’s not the body.
Nor do the bodies rising out of the flames of the Katyn Memorial burn like bodies. In Baltimore, at President Street and Aliceanna, the Polish soldiers climb flames like stepstools, their gilded forms lofted, on righteousness, up. The fire itself is sturdy and trusted; it becomes the men’s legs and thus they are “enduring in memory,” and mean to show the spirit unbroken. The spirit rising.
But this is not the body in flames.
And in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, even the bones themselves are not the body. Are a portion standing in for the whole, synecdoche, not meant to be Michael J. Blassie, shot down in An Loc in 1972. Though it is he, the DNA test now tells us. Unequivocally. But the medal of honor, though it hung over him for fourteen years, does not, it was ruled, belong to him.
He just lent his body to an idea.
“We really believe the medal should follow Michael,” said Captain Patricia Blassie of the Air Force, his sister.
But it can’t. It must not be allowed to attach to a body. Must remain: clean. Rapturous. Dignified.
In perpetual anonymity.
The titles of Goya’s etchings in
The Disasters of War
are amazingly simple. #22—“All This and More.” #23—“The Same Thing Elsewhere.” #37—“This Is Worse.” And here, I stop. Soldiers rest in a grove of trees, but nearby, impaled on a jagged stump, as partial and perfect as any Greek statue: his body, his shapely calf, the shadings of thigh and muscled back and, filling the space where his forearm was hacked, a darkness in the background flowering.
The Disasters of War
are amazingly simple. #22—“All This and More.” #23—“The Same Thing Elsewhere.” #37—“This Is Worse.” And here, I stop. Soldiers rest in a grove of trees, but nearby, impaled on a jagged stump, as partial and perfect as any Greek statue: his body, his shapely calf, the shadings of thigh and muscled back and, filling the space where his forearm was hacked, a darkness in the background flowering.
I did not know a man could grow from a tree, until I saw precisely how.
I did not know the ways, precisely, a neck goes taut with fear, until
Guernica
. Did not know a mouth, uptilted as simply as a cup, could fill so easily with black cries, or the many ways animals could scream. That growing from a neck, a leg can arc around and pierce the neck; a kneecap weigh so much upon escape it drags along the floor, or breasts go sharp. That triangles spurt. That from the hilt of a sword a twisted flower might grow like a mangled fist.
Guernica
. Did not know a mouth, uptilted as simply as a cup, could fill so easily with black cries, or the many ways animals could scream. That growing from a neck, a leg can arc around and pierce the neck; a kneecap weigh so much upon escape it drags along the floor, or breasts go sharp. That triangles spurt. That from the hilt of a sword a twisted flower might grow like a mangled fist.
Mississippi. 1954. Emmett Till, fourteen, is murdered for whistling at a white woman in a store, his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. “All beating was concentrated around his head,” said his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, describing the body when it was returned to her in its coffin. “It looked as if they had taken a nut-picker and picked the left eye out. The right eye was about mid-way to his cheek, his nose looked like they had taken a meat chopper and just chopped along the bridge of the nose. Where they tied that gin fan around his neck, the weight of it had choked his tongue out. I did not know a human tongue was so big.”
His nickname was Bobo.
His face was strip-mined. A ditchful of flux. A pile of slag.
A sand dune sliding. A plate of meat. Mushrooms in a field of rain.
I was not yet born at the time, so I looked up the face in
Jet Magazine.
Jet Magazine.
At the funeral, the coffin was kept open. His mother said she “wanted the world to see what they did to my boy.”
Da Vinci flayed the human body to better understand, to draw “sweet fleshiness with simple folds and roundness of limbs.” “Do not” he said, “make all the muscles of your figures apparent... limbs which are not in exercise must be drawn without showing the play of muscles. And if you do otherwise, you will have imitated a bag of nuts rather than a human figure.”
I did not know muscles wrapped in bands from chest to shoulder, tucked into the upper arm and folded under. That below the sinews and tendons, muscles were strapped like the staves of a basket across the chest. Until I went to see how autopsies are done, I did not know how small and pale the stomach was, that empty lungs are not light but will flop like fins when turned over, the two-lobed right one and the three-lobed left. That intercostal veins thread through the chest like perfectly basted hems. The epiglottis purses like the lip of a pitcher, and when the pituitary gland is lifted free of the brain it pops out with a neat little sound.
Fat is so yellow.
Veins are not blue but a soft, pearly gray.
A memorial can happen anywhere.
As it did, just recently, at a friend’s farm. I was walking through the yellow-brown stubble in early fall, after the last hay was cut, when I saw a deer. It was curled in a grassy depression just before a stand of trees. The deer was so small that I startled, thinking it was sleeping in a little nest. But when I moved toward it, it didn’t stir and I saw near the jaw a quarter-sized hole. The body was perfect except for the hole, which was terribly precise. The hole was deep, and the blood hadn’t slipped in runnels all over but dried black at the rim. I had never seen a deer that close. So I stayed.
I circled around again. On one side, the body was perfect, but then on the other, when I crossed over, there was the hole come upon like disbelief, the perfect jawbone pierced through, collapsed in. The hole like a cave. Like a cup. Like an ear, half-drowned and mud-filled. The darkness there was seeping pink. The pink underneath was—I couldn’t tell what. So I stayed with the body. So I kept looking in.
On Looking Away: A Panoramic
O
nce I saw:
nce I saw:
at an exhibition, balanced on its points, a blowfish, inflated, shellacked. Its empty stomach was mottled pink, brown, and cream. Its mouth was open, the lips a thin, stretched O of surprise. So easy someone had made it to forget the working insides, to forget, so we might tilt toward the light a hollow balloon of pleasure. Dip safely a finger into the spaces between flared needles.
And once . . .
But it wasn’t just once. There are so many things to consider looking away from.
Once an emerald dragonfly landed in front of me on a cashier’s thin arm. Its jittery sheen articulated as she moved and made her smaller by that trick, partial, and barely seen.
Tattoos are sad things. So one-time-only. The need to be marked so openly displayed and then, well, that little picture is all you get. And how much the poor image is meant to hold: such a record of need, all painstaking decision or quick impetuousness recorded on the skin. The snapshot of the big event and not the big event itself (the one that lives behind the skin, always, always unseen) makes anyone forever the guy with his old war stories. About Johnnie. Remember him? True love you had for that guy. Like a brother . . . wife gave me his medal . . . . Heraldry, desire, homage crushed down to shamrock, Tasmanian devil, or, demurely—let’s not go too far, let’s not go crazy—a sweet-pea vine at the ankle. Muted registers, in case of disappointment. Muted regions of the body, in case of having-to-learn-to-live-with.
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