On Looking: Essays (9 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
If, as Thoreau wrote, “A lake ... is the earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” then consider, too, the ice of a lake into which things are frozen. Lake Erie ice, the sky griping on, unmelodious, moody, and someone’s there now, at the end of the pier, in the very spot where I once was, looking over to Canada. If I were to go on about the cold that winter in Cleveland, my long flu, the solid grays scouring the sky, reminiscence would choke out the space I’m considering: there in the ice, stuff pinned with clear darts of air, and below that, the movement of water still visible.
Small pond in summer: leaning over the edge of a rowboat and seeing down through clear water. At the pool, with goggles: the rough bottom and a few pennies. In the ocean, tucking under the claw of a wave. I don’t remember learning that trick, just one day being safely below and the force rolling over, grazing my back. The wild, colloidal spin just above and how quiet it was, and unlikely, that calm.
A cricket in a cage: the delicacy, lightness, quickness of the captured thing. The impermanence of those attributes, and of those bars. But while the cricket’s in it, there’s the ridge-and-file system of its wings, and you can see its song.
A blowfish, inflated, shellacked and spiky—and hollow as a mason jar.
Coral, held in the hand. The starry spaces bodies left, shallow but enterable.
The displays at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Not only because of the glass between us, but for the intercessory care taken—so that the distant mountain’s painted shadow and the hunter-gatherer’s shadow from the overhead lights do not overlap, there on the plains of Central Africa, where the “family preparing a meal” might, at any moment invite you in.
And while I’m in New York: window displays: their stillness amid the crowds, even if the little fisher-boy’s rod dips in and out of a plastic revolving lake-surface, and even if the off-site fan is set to lift and float and settle the silk across the mannequin’s ever-hardened nipples. Even though I sometimes am made to want what I see. Standing there, in the crowd, all the traffic noise eddying behind me—I cup my hands to the sides of my eyes, and though people cough (usually makes for a “no”—see “planetarium” below) and yell and jostle, and jumble their bags and exhort, they are, of course, supposed to be doing that. They’re a
crowd
. And I, while standing and looking, am apart.
crowd
. And I, while standing and looking, am apart.
Not the planetarium—someone always coughs, disturbing the universe. Not the theater, not the movies: too many others admitted, your knee touching another’s knee at one small point on the curvilinear, the whole of your musculature now distracting.
Alone with the visiting comet. Telescopes, yes.
Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.
The way a busy street clears for a moment of its traffic, fills with the hum of emptiness, which throbs, which arrives like the moment a banner ends in its open-most unfurling. How long can it possibly last, that squall of silence, filling and surging, as loud as anything that’s been calling and calling, unheard, all this time.
Bubbles. Only, briefly.
An apartment peephole, if you can tiptoe up, breathe very quietly, and do not intend to open the door.
Oven windows. Not-opening to peek.
Two of my friends got sugar eggs every year: Yvonne, whose family in Germany sent one at Easter, and Ilene, who was given a new egg at Passover. Ilene kept each egg (from Itgen’s Coffee Shop in Valley Stream, NY) in its cellophane wrapping on a shelf. One was the size of a football; others were small, like walnuts or lemons or grapes. I loved to take them down and look at them when I visited, which was often. I was happy when, over time, the wrappings dried and fell off and I could hold the eggs’ rough crystal curves in one hand and darken or brighten the scene with the other. Sometimes I came away with flecks of sugar on my hand. My sister and I never got sugar eggs.
Not getting: absolutely.
The Pin
Nothing can trouble the dominance of
the true image. Whether from graves or from rooms,
let him praise finger-ring, bracelet and jug.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
. . . a chair
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the universe . . .
—Zbignew Herbert
W
hat the pin wants, sharp now and sprung, bright ache in the last green grass before winter, is its tension restored, hand in its pocket, head in its helmet again.
hat the pin wants, sharp now and sprung, bright ache in the last green grass before winter, is its tension restored, hand in its pocket, head in its helmet again.
I’m leaving it there so I might come upon it, so what I call
today
might assemble—morning’s low slant around the pin’s open arc, late afternoon’s autumn light darkening already as I walk home.
today
might assemble—morning’s low slant around the pin’s open arc, late afternoon’s autumn light darkening already as I walk home.
I do not touch it, do not fix it, and always, by the time I come upon it resting on the corner lawn of the sociologist’s house, I’ve worked up to a good pace, full of intention. And there’s the pin, a prize, a treasure, bright enough for a child to grab, but I do not close it. I want it to be as an equivalent, to match my surprise with its ragged grin, to surprise like desire come upon. The pin is the very picture of something undone—or an elsewhere falling apart from its lack. If I can call the pin
image, memento, moment suspended,
then the whole northeastern Ohio sky draws close, bends down here in Baltimore, and here come the cornfields along East College where, as a student, I’d ride my bike miles from town, south on Professor, turn east and be gone.
image, memento, moment suspended,
then the whole northeastern Ohio sky draws close, bends down here in Baltimore, and here come the cornfields along East College where, as a student, I’d ride my bike miles from town, south on Professor, turn east and be gone.
I’d ride for an hour, two hours and still not exhaust whatever it was I was trying to run out of myself. Along Hamilton Street, laundry hung on gray lines, even in the cold, in late October: boxy school jumpers, work pants in all sizes, the slate greens, the straight lines solemn and stiff, as I flew by. I’d slow down to pass the old Beulah Farm orphanage, its bare dirt yard and one-room schoolhouse, and sometimes the orphans themselves playing behind the splintering fence. Mostly, there were fields and fields of corn, which in the spring made the back roads into intimate hallways striped with light where the stalks parted like doors creaking open.
Once in the fall, a friend and I biked far, past fields of harvested corn. We rode not talking much, comfortably silenced by the wind in our faces, one pulling ahead for a stretch, then the other, until cresting a hill, we saw a white farmhouse rise up. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the porch. Below the
Do Not Enter
sign nailed to the door, we tried the knob and it opened. I crossed over with my friend, who in the shaded living room, amid the scattered stuff of disaster I surely kissed. Or, after poking around for a while, it was he who brought something to show me, a stained, crumpled shirt, a week-old newspaper, and, bent together over the object, we breathed our few words near each other’s faces, necks, closer still, until the decision to touch and be touched dissolved. It was something any of us would have done—used the props of the moment to frame, to give shape to our desire. Then, among pots on the stove with their lids askew, piles of mail, work coats and muddy boots by the door, the moment grew suddenly large. The weight of the unknown event, the lives we moved so easily among displaced us, and we left, quickly uncomfortable.
Do Not Enter
sign nailed to the door, we tried the knob and it opened. I crossed over with my friend, who in the shaded living room, amid the scattered stuff of disaster I surely kissed. Or, after poking around for a while, it was he who brought something to show me, a stained, crumpled shirt, a week-old newspaper, and, bent together over the object, we breathed our few words near each other’s faces, necks, closer still, until the decision to touch and be touched dissolved. It was something any of us would have done—used the props of the moment to frame, to give shape to our desire. Then, among pots on the stove with their lids askew, piles of mail, work coats and muddy boots by the door, the moment grew suddenly large. The weight of the unknown event, the lives we moved so easily among displaced us, and we left, quickly uncomfortable.
But while we stayed, we stayed because we were protected by a curiosity so certain of its task, that things—boots, mail, pots, our bodies—offered themselves, first tentatively and then with urgency, as if for us alone, solicitous as all objects of adoration, as all objects in stories lure us, irresistible and catalytic.
I felt certain nothing could happen to me in that house, or to him, even as we walked through the wreckage, because I could
see
us there. Even as we touched a few derelict things, isolated, stubbornly beautiful glass things—faceted doorknob, etched wedding goblet—even as he held up an old newspaper anxiously between thumb and forefinger, we were like characters caught in the instant of being created. Thus constituted, I watched myself leave the farmhouse even as I left the farmhouse, saw myself riding, even as the wind lifted my hair, downhill now and coasting fast, the fields on either side cut to stubble, the late afternoon clouds jagged and heavy as purple cliffs.
see
us there. Even as we touched a few derelict things, isolated, stubbornly beautiful glass things—faceted doorknob, etched wedding goblet—even as he held up an old newspaper anxiously between thumb and forefinger, we were like characters caught in the instant of being created. Thus constituted, I watched myself leave the farmhouse even as I left the farmhouse, saw myself riding, even as the wind lifted my hair, downhill now and coasting fast, the fields on either side cut to stubble, the late afternoon clouds jagged and heavy as purple cliffs.
My bicycle was a blue three-speed clunker. I loved it inordinately. Riding to class, or home late after the library closed and town was shut tight, I’d practice feeling both its presence and absence. I would say, contriving nostalgia, “I loved swinging the bike under me and taking off ” even as I swung the bike under me and took off. I’d fly, and see the moment of flight in my head. I lived preemptively with loss, memorializing instances. Even the names of nearby towns, whispered under my breath at odd times during the day, for the sound, for the shape alone, names redolent of small bars and lake-side ease and postindustrial collapse, were both present and simultaneously ancient, unreachable: Canton, Elyria, Lorain, Medina. Even as I walked and sat, ate and drank in those towns, I was a feature of their passing. Even then, another’s body was both landmark and landscape, steep climb and descent, breath exchanged, passing current, wave, pulse, there, going and gone. And, too, my own body—mine and not mine, offered, recollected, offered again, until I could see its shape as my own, unequivocally.
I anticipate this pin, its sprung tension, and my own, as I step over. I am, every morning and every afternoon, with each going-out and coming-back, startled by its shine, by the light so surely illuminating its sharp tip, its faint rust, the disquieting thoughts that come. A terrible tenderness comes: the dry scratch of the failing Viceroy on my wrist, on my son’s wrist, slow now, dusty and fraying midautumn; my neighbor, who practices writing her name because she is forgetting how the sounds go, what the letters mean. And from further away: at Point Lookout, on Long Island’s south shore, the pale pink of a clam, its stomach in shreds, its inner shell a purple iridescence pooling water; the periwinkle, washed up at high tide, its milky scrim of muscle and row of blue jeweled eyes, drying.
And from further off still, this comes: the cloudy hexagonal window I peeked through on a class trip, and then unscrewed for myself to reach into the cow’s first stomach,
the rumen,
I repeated. We were on a science outing and were meant to put our hands in and explore. We were given cheap, plastic gloves with long, scratchy seams that ran from shoulder to fingertips. “Won’t this hurt?” I remember thinking.
the rumen,
I repeated. We were on a science outing and were meant to put our hands in and explore. We were given cheap, plastic gloves with long, scratchy seams that ran from shoulder to fingertips. “Won’t this hurt?” I remember thinking.
The pin continues as a sliver of glass or jagged piece of shell on the beach continues. The sky here, now, is as low and vast as some other sky, elsewhere and past, and I step over: I, whose hand in a plastic glove swept through a cow’s stomach. I, who was told the window in the cow’s side, the
cannula,
still-awful word, didn’t hurt at all. Imagine the child pairing the word “window” with “stomach”, squaring the phrase “won’t hurt at all” with “the cow’s side is open for us all to touch.” Imagine the child on a high, wobbly stool, sweating, itchy—it was early June—watching, beginning to narrate her own hesitation:
cannula,
still-awful word, didn’t hurt at all. Imagine the child pairing the word “window” with “stomach”, squaring the phrase “won’t hurt at all” with “the cow’s side is open for us all to touch.” Imagine the child on a high, wobbly stool, sweating, itchy—it was early June—watching, beginning to narrate her own hesitation:
She pulled out a handful of cud and it was sweet-smelling. She was not the least bit afraid to press her face against the warm hide, to plunge her arm down and feel the stringy, matted stuff.
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