Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  To mark an occasion with the available props—the word spot, the word scraps. And moments—how meager!

  But it’s this, or no marking at all takes place. With no words, the occasion is gone.

  Yes, words are brief, partial, unlikely, stark.

  Styptic. Wanting.

  Vienna. Japan. Sublime. Bower. Pigs.

  Reader, forgive them all.

  “Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblance” (Theme & Variations)

  There was the eye socket, cranium, jaw, and at the jaw’s hinge, a darkened spot where muscles and tendons would gather in. There, where I stopped, were the bones of a mouth, base around which sensation assembled, arc and dip where joy would mass, interest tighten, a grin inscribe. It was a small animal’s head tilted up (in sun, early fall, the leaves translucing, drying and brightening) inclined toward the three-note call of a bird. Right there, regarding the call, head back and locating the mark, not in danger or hunger, let’s say a raccoon settled into the grass to find a sonorous point in the blue and unencumbered sky, leaves dipping into the picture and shirring, not orange/red/yellow (though they were), for the photoreceptors in a raccoon are differently keyed than ours, and its sky would gray out, its tree putty into a blunter thing from whence the call issued.

  It’s not that I mean to animate the world according to my whims or a lordly perspective, or that I’m bent on assigning virtues, human ones, and sowing them widely among all beings, so I might feel at home everywhere, always. I don’t mean to collapse all that is between the raccoon and me, force kinship, Lia-fy any creature.

  It’s just that here, today, with a quantum of sadness settling in (sadness, not grief with its solid occasions) and a quantum of something else buoyant and lithe, I looked down (perfect skull) and then up (blue sky with birdcall) and the loop of perception closed, countervailed any singular mood, and I was less alone.

  Such a feeling comes on in waves and one goes under I can say, since I grew up near the ocean knowing the excruciations of tides—not because it’s easy to say “wave” for sadness and its workings. I wouldn’t do that, not here, not now; it’s more that I know very well, in a familiar way, the species of force that, without intention, draws one in, and pushes one out again, scoured and worn. Waves plunge, overpower, rash the shore, rake it. Waves sift, wrinkle and breathe. Steed, I learned later, for intense, white-foamed things (The trampling steed, with gold and purple trapt / Chawing the foamy bit, there fiercely stood) so yes, there are many angles to consider—sound, for instance, the tight squeeze of those e’s and the o’s invitation—when noting that waves work well on behalf of layered-up moments.

  (And, I should add, when I first saw Rembrandt’s waves—it was The Abduction of Europa, in a book at home—new shades of sensation were affirmed; I could find, after that, in puffs of real sea foam at any local beach on Long Island, the bull who was Zeus, bearing Europa fast away, Europa seeming up for the ride, muscled and ready, balanced and whole, borne over waves on another’s will, the roiling, darkening sea inviting, the Europa in me RSVP-ing, all I was leaving, and all I’d be finding churning together, suggesting....)

  I so loved the ocean as a child that I had to be dragged out when it was time to go home. If you’ve grown up with waves, you come to learn that they don’t knock you down as much as allow you various decisions about staying upright, show you’ve chosen to stay in their path, try your luck, pit your strength. And though we say “a wave knocked me down,” it’s not that waves care. They’re as rote as heartbeats. Down, though, draws the eye—because Dante’s geography promises you’ll find your very own species among the fallen. Down because Lucifer, who once tended light, fell away from the light, and now lives below us. Because down is where we go for essentials, where we seek the authentic by way of the thoroughgoing need to come clean: Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down/Learn of the green world what can be thy place....

  So let me confirm: when the bird call came, I was looking down. And there was the skull. Surrounding it was a sensation, and above, a sky very deeply blue. Then it happened: the picture got bigger: the skull was, I saw, not a skull at all, but a weathered mushroom, eaten back, or worn away. The whites and creams, the holes for cords, the holes like sockets and the slendering snout—all turned back to gills/stem/cap; there was the shift from bone to mushroom, a rising from solid and going to pith, rigidity softening into flesh.

  In the space a mushroom now held, for full, long seconds, a skull had been.

  That pinned me to the afternoon.

  To concentrate a skull up from a mushroom . . . but no, that’s not it. It went very fast. It was vaster than any conscious thought. To be of a moment that folds up distance, finds no distance between mushroom and skull, allows skull from the first—though there was a patch of new mushrooms right there, shining, fat, rampant, creamy, just-sprung. To be part of a mind that flies past the known (until finally, the cues come on hard: all those days of good, soaking rain, the fast greening of lawns, everything sprouting and shooting like crazy), to be part of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous: at that tufty spot on my neighbor’s grass, with an airy/oceanic blue sky above, mushroom met skull, the resemblance bloomed and extended me. Right into the heart of the afternoon.

  Such resemblances get made in other ways, too:

  Once I spread my fingers and looked at the spot where thumb and wrist meet, and in that depression saw soup plate (what my grandmother called any shallow bowl, and hers were cream-colored, low-fire clay ones, with flat rims of green—how suddenly that comes back to me! ) then crux of a tree for holding rainwater; a hammock; a nest. I saw the imprint of another thumb’s work—I’m not saying God’s (that’s nothing I’d say) just where an actual thumb would have worked, should I have been clay. I considered, too, how other thumbs have worked, right there in that spot, but for pleasure, roiling oceans, vastly, in me—

  Once there was a wound I was tending. How high that highest candle lights the dark I spoke in my head, to steady it all, because the tending made me woozy. The wound was a taper that went far in and down. It involved the colors of a candle flame—what the body chooses for regeneration, chooses to light its dark passages with!—and this was a perilous passage. For a while the light moved like a tide, receding then overtaking the shore, the sweet, cool sand that was the good skin. The known world was there, beside the reds, fatty yellows, off-whites—colors by themselves not at all unpleasant, but on the small island that was the wound, threatening. A wound grows together from underneath first, the inner muscles knitting up, and the surface is the last to close. It all cinched slowly back together (with oxygen treatments, medicine, rest) regained the right pinkness, as the whole body did, regained, as we’d say, the rosy blush of health. And indeed, when it healed, it looked like a rose, was roseate, a furled, tight bud of a scar, and one day, exactly that—rose—was my first thought and not “wound.”

  And once, very suddenly one afternoon last spring, I saw that the apple tree outside my window had grown into the only spot of sun available to it. And so, because there are pines around it, thick, tall ones, and the sunlight is meager and hard to come by, the apple tree is terribly bent, sway-backed and leaning.

  A thing grows into the light available to it.

  This is not just a metaphor.

  And that a mushroom is also a skull, is not a trick of sight alone.

  Against “Gunmetal”

  June. Cape May, NJ. Boardwalk.

  Rain coming harder. People hurrying. People jumping boardwalk puddles with bright sand-centers. Avoiding the spume of passing cars. Ingraytensifying the soft dunes with neon rain gear, all the ponchos calm and isoscelate, then blown scalene in wind. Now it’s more to watch, the dodging and pitching. More, maybe, “fun.” Of interest. “Human interest,” because rain alters people in unexpected ways. And the unexpected makes people so human.

  Remember that.

  Out there on the boardwalk, they’re absolutely ded
icated to being human, and though not one of them has a choice, many variations come forth. All the ways are recognizable, but some are more precise in cast and tensity, saturation and value, and take patience to see and to name.

  Outside’s thunderclap, its tonnage and stipple. The toilet in the room above’s flush. Extended, deepening thunder sounds. The picture window’s darkening glaze. Except for the mother with her hood pulled tight, a sporty family neverminding the rain, laughing, carrying big, wet cups of coffee. A runner tendon-stretching, braced against a stop sign. An old-salt type in a long, yellow slicker waving to someone, or directing the deluge. More cars than usual heading north to the parkway, as goes the decision through many heads at once to leave the shore earlier than planned. Methods of resignation abound: one on a gearless soft-seater pitches into the weather headfirst, a sack of oranges hooked on his arm. Four pedaling a surrey remain committed to their rented hour. The sky brightens. The clouds shift. The cars slow and their numbers decrease. Runners come out, had they ducked under awnings. Outside our window, a gaslamp-style streetlight’s on; it must have self-lit at the first hint of dark. Walkers wearing long sleeves and sweatshirts, who must have tested (head out a window, arm out a door) the temperature before emerging.

  Various pitched rumbles, filling, ablating. A rough sound, that otherwise might be silk tearing, but for now is tires parting puddles. All headlights on. Sky darkening again. Those choosing to be out or having been caught, somewhere on those bodies in the noisy rain: shiny, cicatricial spots of damp. Wet shoulders where clothing is sticking. Abrasions on ankles where sockless shoes rub. Itchy tags. Rings of sweat. Objectwise, sunglasses in bags or hooked at collars. Loose, jangling change. Newspapers rolled and stuffed in back pockets. Some lightning now, but candescent, not the sky-ripping variety. Some darkness lifting at the horizon, baring a strip between sea and sky, like a hem rising over a sock.

  Now the umbrellas, now that the walkers have figured it out: rainy not rain. Dark as any November day, late in the afternoon. Blue turned to its compounds and alloys, its milkier elements, whitened and hardened. On Beach Drive, the activity increases: doppler riffs. Gutters surging. Thunder yanked like special-effect sheets of aluminum, behind the scenes. A jogger who can’t economize movements, whose legs seem strapped on and lack propulsion, whose elbows angle too far from his body, seems wetter than others. Bending in wind, heavy with rain, some hardy beach roses suggest a boat tethered and scuffed against unseen pilings.

  One species of sleeping person can sense rain and somehow knows to stay abed, undisturbed in their summer rental, up and down the beach. An announcement such as this won’t jar them: May I have your attention, please. Lightning is on the beachfront. Lightning is on the beachfront. Clear the area for your safety. It sounds not at all canned: the voice of a real and excited someone, red-faced, soaked and bringing the news. At the horizon where ocean meets sky, a mist congests and erases perspective. Rain threshes the sand. The sky darkens further. The sky turns, toward or into. The sky now. The sky is—what is the shade, gradient, hue, tint I’m seeing? The _________ sky. That sense of searching, fingertips tapping, calling forth terms. Sifting, anticipating: the something sky. Something. Something pushes in. It draws up to full height.

  It blots out any other sky, gunmetal, does.

  How irksome. Gunmetal. What a cliché.

  Strike me down if I use it again. If I don’t, right now, erase this method by which we impart, those of us who know nothing about guns, drama to a sky, pressure to a scene, hardness, know-how, coldness to a description, glad for its hint of treachery, its sidelong, thanatotic meanness.

  Why erase, though? Why deny the relief of a shared, common phrase—novelistically charged, not the worst imaginable? You know gunmetal and I know gunmetal: why not meet there? Pretend it’s a bar of the same cool name, “Gunmetal’s” (brushed steel, understated track lighting) and relax, converse, affirm each other’s positions on many Big (or breezy and minor) Life Issues. Since I had nowhere to go this evening and you were free, and isn’t that better than staying home? Even if I know where the conversation’s headed? And really, you’re perfectly decent company, you aren’t at fault. But after an evening like this, I’m way more antsy and hardly refreshed, since I’m not at all changed or challenged or stretched. And neither are you.

  And yes, the coldness of a gun pertains. A gun is, when you first hold it, very cold, and way heavier than you’d think—say a .22, hitched right up against the shoulder. At least the one I shot weighed more than I expected, made as it was, of . . . I don’t know what. Gunmetal, I guess. I hardly have anyone to ask about this. One strictly seasonal pheasant-hunting friend, who will answer modestly and not say one thing beyond what he knows. Another who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, and though that’s long ago now for him, I hesitate. Because maybe it’s not so long ago, the way rogue scenes slide in when you’re making a sandwich, washing your hair, touching your sleeping child’s face.... Also, I’ve seen that tree, in the photo in his living room, the tree he’s standing so uprightly next to (he in his uniform, and both so thin they look related) and something came just before the photo and something happened just after it, to the side of the tree, or behind it—it’s that the tree’s starkness is a point of reference. There is, I think, a lot more he knows, for example, on the subject of grenades, that I don’t want to ask about either, there being no “grenade blue” I’m harrying here. Though there’s a sky for that, too. A misty tint, a haze indicating surprise detonation, rain turned to hail, very suddenly.

  But I want to know what “gunmetal” means, and found the perfect guy to ask, a friend of a friend, a gunmaker out west, who’s currently working on a matchlock from 1510 (“older than all my friends combined” he says.)

  My questions, of course, are embarrassingly basic.

  And yes, I do need to start at the beginning.

  Jim writes: Glocks are made of plastic with metal inserts in the receiver or frame (the part you hang on to), the slide and barrel are metal and the color is determined by the options you choose. (He’s seen pink as well as sky-blue ones). The basic metal a .22 is made of varies but it is always shiny silver, what we in the trade call “in the white.” This reflects that it has not been colored or coated yet. The coloring (whether it be bluing, Frenching, coating or browning) is put there to keep the metal from corroding or oxidizing in an undesirable manner. “Gunmetal” as a color is usually a gray, more technically called “French gray.” Think of the dark ash on charcoal, only shiny.

  The shiniest guns would be chrome or nickel-plated, the blackest ones would be the black epoxy-coated; black chrome is black beyond belief, but is shiny like a mirror. These coatings can be applied to any firearm. I have examples of almost anything you would like . . .

  Almost anything I would like . . . as, too, this sky is variously compounded, concussive, concupiscent, and oh, could be layered with names transfinitely: it’s the rivery color a silver spoon turns when held in a flame. It’s the color of a well-used plumber’s wrench. A perfectly battered railroad tie. I try on: A burnt-spoon sky. Below a sky where we sat down, under wrench-colored clouds. Before the sky opened and a rain as hard as railroad ties fell.... It’s the color of a cataract (which, very like “promontory,” is not much in use, ever-nailed as they are to the nineteenth century, provenance of the Lake District poets). It’s a kinked intestine-gone-bloodless-pale sky. Translucent, unfeathered, fallen-chick silver. Powdered zinc. Stripped olive pit. Dirty-kid water in a porcelain tub. Farinaceous. Clayey. Grime in pressed tin. So why gunmetal? If it’s something about the act of smithing, why not things from the worlds of cooper, tinker, wainwright, glazier? I suppose the throwback quality’s engaging—the forging, the shine, the bluing, blacking and browning—but mostly, I think, it’s rugged and hip to suggest with this phrase you know something about guns; enough at least to toss likeness around. You have to like a likeness to toss it (note: kids running, jostling, outshouting each other as they race to a car will c
all “shotgun!” not “side saddle!” not “the seat next to my mom”).

  If you’re really set on naming a sky by way of armaments, try a breech-loading carbine’s pencilly softness, or another from the Civil War (see the excellent display at the Gettysburg Visitor Center), a Harper’s Ferry musket whose mottling looks like winter rain. Try a cannon’s smoothbore, or case shot, the spherical or precisely penile munitions, pocked, blackened and smutted by all the ways they ruined a body, rolled, muddied and were gathered up again for duty. Try the brass coat buttons, buckles, and plates identifying cavalry, riflemen, musicians, artillery, infantry, engineers, and the tarnish spots there, that color, where the salts in blood wore away the finely wrought eagles, lyres and flags. A mess cup’s the color of the Potomac in winter. A bayonet’s black as a rasping crow. And “rust,” it turns out, is a complicated blood-dew-gunsmoke amalgam.