On Looking: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  A dragonfly slowed midair, hovering like a coppery breath.

  Then the oddest ache came: a body that small, and everything works—the up and the down inseparable, thoughtless; the motion-as-stasis; the most perfect eyesight; the two sets of wings, their colors like pangs of disbelief.

  The way through the field is entirely clear. There is nothing between the far woods and me—just motes, moths, mouths, that coppery breath, the whole raucous force rising, breathing and turning.

  Return

  The wild turkey moves with her chicks across the field, dips her head down and raises it, eating and picking in no hurry at all. Then she settles into the tall grass. I have the whole field, the view thrown wide, the rolling and sifting, but the liveliest part is not for the eye. She stays and stays. I want her to come out again, and when she does, her head is a spot of reddened grain.

  The Whole

  With no dormer of green framing the sky, no honeysuckle scrimming the light, I expect the field now, the whole arrayed, expect the wide sweep in front of me—the curled fists of new ferns, the milkweeds’ closed hooves among the tall grass. Thistles. Daisies. The clamorous reach of purple asters.

  Further off, the turkey is a drop of sound, oak, oak, far back in its throat, oak, wetly and darkly, only the sound burrowing in, finding a spot in the sway of grasses. The grasses lapping like a body of water.

  Darknesses

  Everything in the field has a name, one the eye pulls from the wash of green to steady itself: saw grass, timothy. And where the field stops and the woods begin? The abrupt edge, bird watchers say, a sheltering darkness made wholly of green.

  Reprieve

  Earlier in my visit, she would have appeared in smudges through the tangled brush, a flash of red, her brown-flecked body a crumple of patterns. Now she steps, for long moments, into the open.

  Nearby, the chicks are learning their way through the field. A cool, almost cold breeze blows, and they stop. And when they move off again, they’re into the phlox.

  I see the stalks crush underfoot.

  I can see, too, the chicks following her. And when they scatter into the field, how they part the long grass like rivulets and are gone.

  Imperceptibly, as a day deepens.

  As my friend is going.

  As the distance is going, piecemeal to the edge.

  Lush edge where sight stops and the body goes in.

  (in memory, Margot Bos Stambler)

  Falling Houses: mise-en-scene

  I know someone who drops houses.

  Small houses. Condemned ones. He buys them for nothing and uses cranes and helicopters to haul, then drop them from on high, then he drops the pieces until they reduce to sharp angles and wire and corrugation, and he photographs the drops.

  For a while I just looked at the photos—the colors, the angles, the motion. The order of descending shapes. The evolutionary lopping of edges, the cracking of form.

  Now I don’t know what to think. But I think I’m supposed to be thinking. So here goes:

  The subject doesn’t seem to be the ominous destruction of the family.

  The process isn’t wasteful, since the houses are going to be demolished anyway.

  I read that the artist doesn’t like to talk about how he does it—that he “never intended the process to be a concern for the viewer.” He just takes the pictures and presents them, massive and simply framed. He is “happier when people react to the actual image.”

  But then, his catalog provides all these sneak peeks at the process . . . helicopters positioning houses for a drop; the cluttered work sites; rented trailers and folding tables loaded with lunch; plans unscrolled like blueprints; disembodied fingers pointing; the artist, central in white T-shirt and jeans, walkie-talkie clipped to his belt wearing his regulation hard hat.

  So now I’m thinking about ruins, the conscious creation of ruins.

  I’m thinking that to ruin a thing, one must behave like time and weather, assume the prerogative of the elements. Or the point of view of a child standing over a dirt world, finger outstretched, alert to his shadow darkening the hills. The foot-soldier ants. The rain rivulets coursing through towns, pebble roads, rosebud cars. Raise a hand up, bring a hand down. One must have a mind for roughshod turns of phrase to say create a ruin.

  I suppose these might be models of houses hung against blue backing, plush velvet for texture and to absorb the light richly. I suppose he could have pinned the model with wire from above, snipped the wire, and let the house fall, burned out the tripod’s shadow when printing. Or for menacing turbulence, cast shadows with pieces of cardboard, thrown dust in the air, or Venetian glitter (imported, fifty to eighty dollars an ounce) to get the effect of a storm approaching, that particular colloidal havoc. He might have filtered a tinge of green to deepen the sky. Learned, from a guy we both knew who grew up in Oklahoma, to view the storm-world from the belly of a ditch, to try that angle, and shoot the house as it pulley-and-levered by in a hail of marbles (Cat’s Eyes, nineteen dollars a sack at Land of Marbles, in New York.)

  There must be a thousand ways to make a thing seem to be a falling house, and the story behind it big.

  Oh.

  I get it. Making-it-seem.

  No houses are falling.

  The site isn’t real. The crew isn’t real.

  Everything made is coming unmade.

  Da Vinci—forgive me for harkening, of course it’s unfair, out of step, out of line, a bit panicky, I know—Da Vinci drew the human body as if he were the body’s creator, instructing us, once he himself perfected the gesture, about how, precisely when the arm extends, these muscles pull, and these wrap and cantilever bone. He wrote it all down, every move, to show the world—so hidden, so close—just below a flap a skin.

  Or, put this way, Schiller wrote in “Ode to Joy,” and of the poem itself, “this is my kiss to the world.”

  What must the artist think of us studying his catalog’s photos of crews, the crane, the hard hats, the crowds assembling? Is he having a laugh? Is anyone laughing?

  Am I missing any laughter here?

  Isn’t it good to laugh a little?

  I’m looking up, as the artist suggests, into the blue, blue, blue of the photograph sky, and see there the green corner of a roof coming toward me. There’s a sweetness to the green. A sadness to the falling.

  If I know I’ve been led to believe a house is falling, can this picture still be an ode?

  Can it constitute a song of praise, glorify a history, embody the broken, lost-forever, irretrievable bygone and frame it up against the clear sky?

  Couldn’t I go so far as to say here is our age’s response to still-life, and sidle it up to the seventeenth century’s Dutch flowers/fish/fruit picked and held precisely, lusciously up to the light, or against the high sheen of a gathering dark?

  What is this note and tone of green pressed flat against the so-very blue?

  Critique? Transgression?

  Subversion, appropriation? Is this “terrain?” (Not, of course, real dusty ruts and vertiginous drop-offs, but nonetheless that which is meant to be rocky, uncharted?)

  Here is a process, wherein we’re meant to see something whole hoisted, dropped, and hoisted again until there’s nothing left to lift and drop.

  Is this playing like an elegy?

  Am I feeling elegiac?

  And don’t the complications of this project (staging the sites, trussing the houses) have something to do with art’s inherent artifice? (To go through all this to drop a house!)

  Are these very questions the subject—heady, cloudy as they are—as others have chosen sinew and muscle and bone for their study?

  Is it stupid to talk about Da Vinci, who bled animals dry, who pushed aside the yellow fat to slip his hands more deeply in, who drew quickly and, when not quickly enough, wore a mask to dull the scent?

  Who drew with characteristic delicacy the most grotesque deformities. Who could lavish a wart. Caress a humpback.
r />   Reread, now embraced by quotations marks, the following words four paragraphs above: “complications,” “sites,” “houses.” I think you’ll hear the particular laughter I was referring to earlier. Or at least an oscillation. Some tonal ether, some trickster wobble.

  Or try these phrases I’ve made up, in catalogese:

  “We speculate, yes, but are made to see only what the artist wants us to see . . . thus our unease, suspicion, doubt . . .” “. . . and that successful tension . . . charms, frustrates, cajoles.” I haven’t worked it out fully, but the words “indeterminate” and “mediate” would figure in somewhere.

  I’m pretty sure these thoughts are obvious.

  But what of the feelings these images stir?

  I know, I know . . . feelings and stir.

  But I keep coming back to this spot of green. That’s all, just the green, which, above all, holds me. It’s of ripe avocados and hard young apples. Thin-skinned lake plants, as they float, cloud and wave. A curl of lime peel. New moss. Peridot, milked down with light. This simple-flat, sad-tender green, suspended against the broom-swept cirrus sky . . .

  It’s been a year now since she died.

  Of all the green I make a stillness. Of sun-through-leaves, now, this June, I make a stillness. Of all the green, transparent spots I make a moment. I make a moment to hold her, and she falls, really falls, every time.

  Glaciology

  Plan

  When the snow began to melt, the drifts left behind a surprising collection of junk—paper cups, socks, Matchbox trucks, a snarl of CAUTION-POLICE-CAUTION tape, pinkly wrapped tampons, oil-rag T-shirts, banana peels: intimacies of toy box, bathroom, and garage amid the lumps of sand and salt we threw down for traction. It was as if after the big event of snowfall we’d forgotten there was more, still, to be said. A cache of loose details below to attend. A trove poised. A stealth gathering.

  Deposition below the singular-seeming white cover.

  I shall make my own study of snow and time. I will learn from that which has built the very ground I’m now slipping around on: glaciers. Their formative act: deposition, for example: fine grained rock debris, rock flour, and coarse rock fragments picked up or entrained within the base of a glacier and then transported and deposited from either active or stagnant ice. This product of glacial deposition, known as till, consists of particles that follow complicated routes, being deposited on the top or along the sides of the glacier bed, entrained again, and finally dropped. As a sediment, till has certain distinctive features: it exhibits poor sorting, is usually massive, and consists of large stones in a fine matrix of minerals and rock types.

  Poor sorting: I like that: that it all gets dropped, the big stuff enmeshed with the grainy soft stuff. The indiscriminate mess. That it forms a long train, so that seeing it all, one can trail events back. Guess at them. View time. And by way of the whole scattered and shifting pattern, by the gathering eye, make something of these loose details, collecting.

  Deposition on Thaw

  I will note, though its impetus was warmth, the sharpness of the thaw. During the thaw we were given to see the way snow melted into vertebrae, whole bodies of bone inclined toward one another. Bones stacked and bent in the attitude of prayer, the edges honed and precarious. Forms arced over the sewer grates and curbs as the gutter streamed with bubbly melt. What remained were not yet remains. It was clear how the warmth would eat everything down, but where some parts were colder than the rest, that core kept the figure upright. The shapes were knife-edged, hunched, easing a pain; they grayed and were everywhere pocked with dirt, and unlikely in their strength.

  A few days later, just sheering, frayed patches covered the ground, and the elbows of everything poked through. White remained where the ground must have been colder, or wind blew and packed the snow hard.

  How to read a land?

  There were thicknesses, white places layered in smears that others were trained to read. Densities amid the rivulets of veins. Occlusions. Artifacts.

  I remember, about the X-ray, thinking Artifacts? That sounds harmless. Evidence of some action passed—little shard, small bit taken out of my body and sent off for further study. Vase, mirror, tile. Lip of a cup. A thing that remained to be found and told. An image that sings about time.

  Deposition on the Shapes of Tasks

  Waiting all that long week—for test results, the snow to stop, dough to rise, nightfall—small tasks turned into days. Days unfolded into tasks. The inside-out arms of clothes pulled right, made whole and unwrinkled, took lovely hours. Tasks filled like balloons and rounded with breath; they floated and bumped around the day: some popcorn, some dishes, some mending. And though dressing for sledding, undressing, and draping everything wet over radiators was deliberate, a stitch ran through, jagged and taut, cinching the gestures tight with uncertainty. Everything coming down—snow, sleet, threat, delicacy—twined through like a rivulet, that cut water makes in its persistence, its pressure carving, so the bank grows a dangerous, fragile lip. The work of glaciers changes a landscape: old stream valleys are gouged and deepened, filled with till and outwash. Filled, of course, over millions of years. In sand-grain, fist-sized increments.

  This kind of time illuminated tasks one would hardly be given to see otherwise. Titled them, even: the scraping of old wax from candlesticks; the tightening of loosened doorknobs. Oil-soaping the piano keys.

  Deposition on Fevers and Still Lifes

  That week time was ample, broad as a boulevard, a stroll, a meander. Not a tour. Not a map or a path to be found. School was canceled. Scents fully unfolded—coffee, chocolate, and milk marbling together on the stove, thinnest skin across to touch and lift and eat. And like a concentrate of heat itself, my bounded sight burned holes in the things most fixed upon: the ceiling’s old butterfly water stain. One rough, gritty chip in the rim of a favorite cup.

  It was in this way that joy and severity flared everywhere: along the banks of steep places I went to quickly, glanced, then ran from. They burned together in cornmeal in a pour, the yellow dust that rose and stuck to my hands as I folded in the unbeaten eggs, cold suns to poke and dim with flour—as outside, too, the cold sun dimmed, and the sky sifted and shushed down.

  Yes, that week passed with a fever’s disheveled clarity. That time, its atmosphere, moved the way fevers by turn dilute and intensify moments, so by evening one cannot reconstitute the day and calls it “lost,” calls it “flown,” says after a night’s sleep “what happened to the day?” Things that week were touched in sweaty uncertainty and weakly released. There were intimacies akin to falling back to a pillow after water, soup, and tea were brought, gratitude unspoken; the night table’s terrain, the book, the book’s binding, glue at the binding and the word for each sewn section, folio, surfacing from far off. The sheet’s silk piping to slip a finger idly under for coolness.

  In its riotous stillness, that week was a study—Dutch, seventeenth century, with its controlled and ordered high flare and shine. Days held the light and feverish presence of a bowl of lemons in pocked disarray. Always one lemon pared in a spiral of undress, its inner skin gone a flushed, sweet-cream rose. Always the starry, cut sections browning and the darkness, just beyond the laden table, held almost successfully off. I, with my props—mixing bowl, dough—tilted toward, soaked in late afternoon light, while time raged all around in shadow, the dark stroking cup, quartered fig, plate of brilliant silver sardines left on the counter from lunch.

  Deposition on Millennia/Effluvia

  To say “a glacier formed this land” sanctifies the blink of an eye.

  To see, from the air, glacial streams and think like a snake or ribboning, and of the land on either side accordion or fan colludes against awe. Neatens up the work of time. Makes of time a graven thing, hand-sculpted, carved, and held. Time should seize, should haul us back, then let go, wind-sheared into now, breathlessly into the moment’s hard strata. Each morning in Rome, my old friend runs in a park along the aqueduct, whi
ch breaks and restarts in yellowed fields, its arches sprouting wild grasses, its arches collapsing, the houses, apartments, roads of his neighborhood visible through it—as houses and roads have been for nearly 2,000 years. You can sit on rocks in Central Park, soft outcrops undulant as sleeping bodies, formed tens of thousands of years ago and look up at the city skyline knowing the North American ice sheet flowed exactly that far south. Or hold in your hand a striated stone from Mauritania, abraded at the base of a glacier 650 million years ago, and touch the markings, those simple scratches so easily picked up and put down again on the touch-me table at the museum. Kick any stone beneath your foot, here, in Baltimore, and you’re scuffing easily 300 million years of work.

  I cast back for any one thing I did on any one day that week: how unencumbered the brushing of my hair, the perfect scrolls of carrot peel I lowered like a proclamation into the hamsters’ cage; careless grace of understatement, luxury of simple gesture after gesture (fork to mouth, mouth to glass, fork and glass rinsed in the sink and—linger here, see the heat pulling fog up the glass, atilt and cooling in the drainboard). I’m calling up the tongue-and-groove gestures, the hook-and-eye moments of the day, so they might again spend themselves freely, mark the layers of events en route, classify the waiting. Cajoled from somewhere back in the morning, the peeling of that tangerine (cut thumb plunged into the yielding core, stinging and wet and red) comes forth.

  I am recalling such occasions for attention offered in a day I was free to ignore. And now, am not free at all (for this is a deposition): cutting burnt crust away; snagging a sock on a rough stair plank; digging a sliver of dirt from a nail under running water. I am tied to the sight of the world, to things burnished and scoured by use, and by their diminution loved—as I so loved and saved my grandmother’s wooden cooking spoon, older than me, smooth as driftwood, when to relieve her boredom, her aide used it to plant and prop a geranium on the balcony. The spoon has folded into its profile, has tucked within it, englaciated, the rim of the aluminum roasting pan (why that of all the nicked saucepans and ceramic bowls of creamy batters tapped and tapped and tapped against?). I took and washed (as my grandmother no longer can wash) its singed rack burns, its smooth neck, thinned from lifting huge roasts by their taut white lacings.