by Lia Purpura
Contradict broke apart, escaped like a gas and entered the air precisely here: climbing a rough, wooden ladder into the loft where everyone slept. I am at my parents’ friends’ farm, 1970, in northern New Hampshire, a safe home for conscientious objectors en route to Canada. I’m on rung three or four following the younger brother up; he’s got a hole in his thick, wool sock, the hems of his jeans are caked and dirty after milking the cow and his brother’s voice is trailing us both: “Jamie, don’t contradict me.” I knew at once the word to be a borrowed one. It was clumsy, too big and too new in the older boy’s mouth, but it worked, the tumblers of contra– and–dict clicking hard, the loft air both dusty and cold, the anger above and below me, pressing. I said nothing, alone with the word. Lobbed, slammed, unbuckled—contradict—their terrible father’s word, cribbed, choric, refracted—now theirs. And by stealth, mine as well. Mine, since I grabbed it as soon as it fell. Over and over I turned the word, then under my breath I exploded the pieces in all directions: contra/ry, contra/st, contra/ption, contra/ct. . . .
And years later, traveling through France, what are those things, I wondered from the train—little huts dotting the fields?—until I could sift back for the word: haystacks! So changed was the word by those new forms, I almost couldn’t locate it. So here were the great tufted haystacks of France! Monet’s haystacks! And then I had the absolute golds and granite blues to attend the word, hold its cape, to polish and serve! Oh hidden, exoteric pinks and ochers—and still I could hardly get the word to fit! How these forms broke from the Midwestern haystacks I knew, baled and wired, or rolled in plastic in my little college town. How these reconstituted the tufted, leaning sheaves the poets of the Lake District so loved.
All my life, my words worked hard. Stood up to.
Withstood and understood.
I have tried to keep them safe.
By the time I’d learned sublime, I’d already seen its chased grays and lit hurricane greens in the Hudson River School painters’ skies (firmament!), those parlous heights brightening to revelatory, those gorges blackly, mossily seducing. I’d already read Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and to that, too—though I apologize now for the taxonomy of purples I made of it in high school English class—I retroactively applied the word.
My Aunt Pasq made us Easter bread—dense, yeasty and saltless with a hard-boiled egg, shell and all, held fast in its braided center. My grandmother grew tomatoes in her backyard. I had, for “sublime,” the words bread and tomato. I had the phrase “go pick a nice tomato for dinner.” And once out there, alone with my task, I had all to myself the teetering six o’clock light, the peeling and tender, pink-skinned birch shadowing the grass and me, the fence hung with flower boxes we’d watered just that morning, the fence keeping back the weedy graveyard on one side of the house and grocery’s parking lot on the other. That is, sublime was all around—loose, though, and rampant, unaffiliated with the word for it. Even now I say it sotto voce, preferring egg, bread, tomato, birch, wet fence.
(I can go on, though—it’s quiet enough, it’s still dark out this early and I’ll quickly remake that semi’s air horn into a far-off train whistle. So, shhhh.) We made our beds in the morning. We did not throw clothes on the floor, nor did we put our shoes on the couches. Nothing ripped was worn in my grandmother’s house. There was sherry sometimes. Some bathroom nymphs. Melon balls in translucent green bowls. A glass butter dish. We had cream in that house, whipped, with crushed pineapples and spread between layers of airy-wet cake for birthdays. On the mantle, a pair of porcelain doves. There was a vase with blue and gold trim and a Schubert-era, rosy, coiffed woman who watched you over her very bare shoulder as you took a bath. There were French perfume bottles on a mirrored tray, each with a dram of valuable scent gone brown and syrupy at the bottom. There was a vanity table, though we never said “vanity,” and neither did we have the words “highboy,” “chifforobe,” “antimacassar.” We had shelf and cabinet and slip cover. In jewelry boxes, a few good things sat apart from the more spectacular rhinestones and mod, white, baubly stuff. In the living room, me in a red velvet frame, my sister in gold. My mother as a bouncy kid, also framed on my grandmother’s dresser. My mother in college, with a short cap of hair, luminous with who knows what pleasure and sadness contained beneath the decorum and perfect, sourceless light.
And always, just outside my great aunt’s bedroom window (not the train-facing window, mine when I stayed there, but the south-facing one)—ah, there it was. Jump down from the high and strictly made bed, step onto the braided rug, move to the window, and there, you could touch it, open onto Vienna. But I never touched it. I never stepped to the window at all. I gazed unfocused, sometimes at it, sometimes through it, from the distance of my bed: Vienna, the way dancers locate a still point, for balance as they spin.
Vienna was far and the light superb. Viennese figures slipped room to room as my father drove over the Williamsburg Bridge at night and I strained to see into the lit apartments, holding, not speaking the word until sleep overcame. Vienna was proper, but earthy-proper. Ever-gracious. (And “whipped cream” there was “schlag,” as it was in our house.) It was something fine. Of my son as a baby, my grandmother would say “such fine features,” and fine meant not delicate, but well-done. Well-made. That care was taken, attention lavished. That he was chosen for lavishing. Though by whom was not the question. Certainly not by me, for I did not build his bones. By whom? There was no word for this, and if there was, and if it was God, it was not spoken in our house. We had, instead, beauty and graciousness. We had “Things worth doing are worth doing well.” For their own sake. Which might have been pride but felt, though I wouldn’t have said it this way, more holy than that. We had, in German, “steal with your eyes” (for my grandmother and her sister gathered their smarts and a suitcase each, and without a word of English, left Augsburg, for good, for New York in their teens.)
There was ease in Vienna and composure more than money could buy. Vienna never touched money. Not a thing there was tacky. Goodness inhered in Vienna—but it was not a hard, marbly good, in sharp focus. It was precisely out of focus. Vienna was en route, like a star, here-but-in-transit, gone even as I experienced it, even as I breathed its proto-weather and spoke the only thing I knew to call it—and only to myself. On the way to Vienna you might be attended by the smell of bacon and buttered rye toast, or by coffee cups clinking in the sink’s wash water. Vienna awaited you again, afternoons—late afternoon, the light angled and private if you wandered upstairs to poke around in a jewelry box or closet or look at some postcards written in elegant Deutsche Schrift or open a drawer and sniff at the lavender sachets or splash on some Echt Kölnisch Wasser No. 4711—or there it was, just before bed, or very early morning, those points of transfer where you could, for a moment, get closer to your stop, anticipate the slowing, the force of braking pressing you harder into your seat: Vienna.
A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch.
A word is, just for a moment, what arriving might be like—before there slips into here. And here goes in earnest search of another elsewhere.
One summer night, when I was six and put to bed while the sun still shone and the game in the street went on without me, I thought to myself, framing it up, “The world is going on without me.” I refused to have the shades drawn, preferring to suffer the full extent of my exile, so the sun blared through the sheer curtains, and there was the game being played and played, way out there in the street, and soon that thought became a globe I both rode and saw myself riding; I reassembled myself upright in Japan—which just minutes ago had been under me—and, dizzier now as the whole earth kept going (how could it, without me!) I held on. Champ, the neighbor’s dog was barking (I narrated), bringing on dusk (very proud of “dusk”) and I could picture Big Jim (way younger than me, no fair!) with his folded jelly-bread sandwich, his skinny, smudgy sister, Louise, some older neighbor kids come for the game, their voices g
rading into the thunk of balls bouncing off garage doors as I walked in the new light of Japan in my wooden sandals and it was Children’s Day or Bon Festival, and how did I come to be here and me, when I could be anyone, anywhere—oh Japan, my word, my key, my globe!
Vienna. Japan. My slantwise places. My bidding, my practice. I cannot, as some do to prove a point, turn a word’s insufficiency into a brightening din or dangerous jumble of shards. I don’t dream of collecting bits for mosaics, or cutting and pasting pretty cascades. I don’t stand little ciphers on their heads, fracture and sample, or rearrange. I keep in mind a belief (how Old World this is, what a peasant I am): who knows a word is girded round with silence finds a way to realms. Behind a stone wall is a garden in brief plenitude; from the train, a blurry arbor and a woman in a housedress flash between chinks of green. From bed, another country lifts into being.
So many have come before me, come up against, come close to the task, hands in it, giving it their very best try. So many in their acute circumstances. The imperiled and delphic Ida Fink, writing after the war:I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in a way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. I was afraid, too, that this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word—we no longer said “in the beautiful month of May” but “after the first ‘action’ . . .”
And recklessly, near speechlessness, so near the snow-blind heart-of-it-all, and sidling close, Paul Celan writes, of words: You prayer–, you blasphemy–, you
prayer—sharp knives
of my
silence . . .
and then, that last line (how does he do it, fly both earth- and skyward at once?)—
You crutch, you wing.
How can I say this—about sunlight, early morning, the path from kitchen to porch in my grandmother’s house—except here, in the company of others who have acknowledged the impossibility of saying and press on. Those who have believed in the partial and particulate matter of words. Lustres, those prickly-bright sensations Emerson said he read for. Virginia Woolf’s “moment of being,” her pattern “behind the cotton wool” admitting the scaffolding that upholds, that is upholding (still, for me) that “invisible part of my life as a child.” “I was conscious—if only at a distance,” she writes, “that I should in time explain it . . . I was looking at the flower bed by the front door . . . ‘That is the whole’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower, part earth, part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.”
Later, when the words could help somehow.
Somehow they help:
When I came downstairs, summer mornings in my grandmother and great aunt’s house, I’d step into the sunlight as it parqueted the floor, I was of sun as it slipped through the lace curtains, the windows were open, grass-scenting the house, and there, very heavy and bent on its stem, was an enormous yellow, or red, or sometimes, best of all, coral rose in a crystal vase, a rose my grandmother had picked earlier than morning. Thus day by day my sympathies increased /and thus the range of visible things /grew dear to me: already I began /to love the sun was years away, but in this way, the fitting room/dining room (my grandmother and great aunt were tailors to the wealthy) collected light, and the light spread across the wooden work-and-dining table—brown-padded to protect its diningness from ferocious pinking shears and razors and dusty marking chalk. I’d pass the (visible and dear) black-and-white patterned couch where the customers sat and waited for fittings, the always-chilly black tile of the sewing room floor (where one could easily see the dropped silver pins and magnet them up at the end of the day, if given the task), and make my way out to the porch where we ate summer breakfasts. The jalousied glass blinds were already opened, early, by my aunt, the slats turned with big, flat keys, the bamboo shades were rolled up, the table set with thin slices of crumbly yeast cake, juice in small glasses, bacon on plates, the paper read and refolded. The greeting good morning, not formal exactly, but a form to be followed, consistent, and yes, spent lavishly on a child. And expected to be banked and spent in return (I was not to say “hi” in the morning.) The newspaper coupons clipped, the napkins stacked in the wooden flip-top box. Hot pink packets of Sweet’N Low (garish, unlikely) loose on a tray and then, years later, in a Lucite container (also wrong, but bought for them at a school fair for Christmas). The walk through the house after coming downstairs, from kitchen, through fitting/dining room to porch, contained the barest shifts of atmosphere—the way crossing a border makes a trip into a journey. Makes it undertaken. Thus I learned to travel in a very small space. I learned distance contained. Walking to breakfast, I slowed like a train, maneuvering onto a new set of tracks. I navigated by way of hem-markers and mirrors. I moved between a line of black and gold Singers, each with its filigree treadle, and racks of hanging gowns to be pressed. I walked and checked the bags of scraps for anything new—a scandalous fur collar, bone buttons, “good things.” We had the phrases “your good coat” and “take off your good shoes if you’re playing outside.” The things of a day were hued and graded, and moved from house dresses to everyday pocketbooks (in seasonal bone, black or white) and finally onto good coats. For kids, the progression went play-school-dress clothes. Later there were evening clothes. Much later, the customers’ hand-me-down gowns, refitted for my sister and me, in case of an affair.
Here with me now are those who know that to set down words is to give to all things a partial face. Who consider the partial not merely insufficient or wanting—because to indulge such a notion would mean no work at all would get done, nothing at all would be made. For Whitman, so seemingly at ease with abundance, the anxiety of sitting down to it, the question of finding a shape for, a precision, was indeed a weight and a trial. Of a bloody night-battle, one of the war’s last, at Chancellorsville, MD, in May 1863, he writes:Who paint the scene, the sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk? Who paint the irrepressible advance of the second division of the Third corps . . . ? Who show what moves there in the shadows, fluid and firm . . . Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—whoe’er can write the story? Of many a score—aye, thousands, north and south, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations—who tells?
Who? Well, he tells—with all the terrible partiality he can countenance—what he sees, all he knows to be lost, too fast gone and unsung:C.H.L., 145th, Pennsylvania, lies in bed six with jaundice and erysipelas; also wounded; stomach easily nauseated; bring him some oranges, also a little tart jelly... I go around from one case to another. I do not see that I do much good to these wounded and dying; but I cannot leave them.
And though he does record degenerate scene upon scene (“One of the officers had his feet pinn’d firmly to the ground by bayonets stuck through them . . .”), of the “real war,” he says, “Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never even be suggested.”
For pages and pages—and indeed the war takes up most of his unruly autobiography—Whitman offers objects touched and seen, the actual stamps, books, pens, coins, and sweets presented at the bedsides of the young soldiers he nursed and wrote letters for, and loved. He culls from his “blood-smutch’d little note-books” everything—wounds, letters, recipes, gestures, scents, finals words—to piece together “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.” He writes of the entire precise and compulsive endeavor, “I wish I could convey to the rea
der the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fastened with a pin.”
He means, I think, that he does what he can.
One night, at college (rural Ohio, attic room, wobbly desk, warm circle of light from a yellow tin lamp), Wordsworth cast forth into the unsayable in a way wholly recognizable to me. There, on a cataract, he might have called it, or promontory of recognition, I circled his definitions of those glowing lozenges of memory, those palpating areas (gone hazy at times with Romantic abstraction—virtue! imagination!) and next to his surprisingly plain phrase, “spots of time,” wrote my very own simple “yes”: There are in our existence spots of time
Which with distinct preeminence retain
A fructifying virtue, whence, depressed
By trivial occupations and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds—
Especially the imaginative power—
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
Such moments chiefly seem to have their date
In our first childhood.
Spots of time: how the words for it cleared a space for future field notes on the subject: Italy. Outskirts of Rome, en route to Minturno. I’m twenty. Friends and I are driving fast in a sports car and stop along a strip of beach to stretch, and so I can take my shoes off and touch the Mediterranean for the first time. I’d been, just moments ago, tasting a column of salty wind blowing in from the front window; opening and closing my eyes in the force of it, turning my head to catch the whistle first in one ear, then the other, pausing the sound by turning away, licking my lips to gather the salt. It is out of this private quietude that I step onto the sand and remove my shoes and walk until the big rock I see, no, the five rocks clustered, then eight come into focus, and closer, closer, they’re rounding and shading until they become—is this to be expected in Italy?—drowned and bloated pigs. Bleached and swelling in the sun, stink complicating the sweet, feathery heat of October. Pigs. The sky is blue and cloudless and the car seats hot when we return. We’re full of the scene and can’t stop talking. Our pockets are lined with it, filled with sun-edged coins to keep and trade and spend for years. “Remember the pigs?” we still say when we meet, now more than two decades later.
