Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  Then, closer to home, came a yellow rose in the yard of the hands-down best gardener in the neighborhood, wet at the top of the climbing bush, bent far from the lattice, heavy and shirred on its stalk, but upright.

  There is a way a flower can be frightening, and this rose was emphatically so. It was doing exactly what it was called to do at the moment, in that instant, the only moment there to receive it. Wholly in time, it was fixed to its task, with all consequence still ahead. It did not refer to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 50, which earlier I had been reading: “For that same groan doth put this in his mind: /My grief lies onward and my joy behind.” No. Centrally commanding as the rose was, as a heart is, it was not a scooped center posed between griefs. It was the yellowest buttercream custard and bowl at once. Unto itself, unhinged from time, I saw it. Not “timeless” in its beauty, but loud. It was, I think, laughing. That yellow might have been a “peal.” There might have been “mirth” or “glee” in its face. The rose might have grown “on a lark” (then flown!). But not then. Not just then. It was fat and its wings were folded. Nimble and fearsome in its flight contained, its one aureate face/body/mind bent on neither staying nor going.

  Really, I think there are more than two minds.

  But a third, bent on settling up: that’s not the state I’m after here. Not a perfectly pleasing, measured harmonic, a synthed and kindled happy medium. A balance, a stasis; form on its way toward resolve, that cant.

  I think we are up to—out there—eleven dimensions.

  I do not believe the earth is flat.

  But I still believe in the humors. I subscribe to all that good theory, from Hippocrates on down, about the origins and travel patterns of feeling and disease, trade routes of blood and phlegm, the yellow and black biles coursing or slogging, the charts measuring consequences of overflow and congestion. I believe in the humors with their assigned temperaments, dispersed and roaring throughout the body, each with its province bounded and hued, its climate matched to the elements residing in spleen, heart, brain, and liver.

  Of course when I’m driving long stretches, I still pull toward the horizon, numinous line that exists and doesn’t exist.

  And when I saw the autopsies performed, the blood therein was poppy red, red unceasingly, and no misty or frothy, clotted or blackened bilious poisons rushed forth from even the most ruined bodies.

  Two minds certainly complicate one’s mythopoetics.

  When I read Dickinson and Whitman back to back, I am reading for the precipitous rise and fall between them. If styles are territories, I want to tack along those open ranges and consider the America that holds them both. I read as if trekking, for the recovery period in which a musculature repairs between one exertion and another. I read for the crevice that opens between the vastness on either side. And I read to fall into the gap there, to be the place where the two shadows go syncretic. Sometimes I get confused: whose shadow, whose shoulder was that rubbing mine?

  I have two shoulders, I know, I know. There’s a voice stationed at each—her strain, his force; the oracular and choric; whisper and yawp. And there between them, I tense and hollow out pockets in my collarbone. I make myself a harrowed place into which each abundance, each with its differing cargo falls, for one is not more dense than the other, or more weighty, ecstatic, agonal, dire.

  The scission that has been made between them, I am not upholding.

  On my way back from Poland where I lived for a year—almost two decades ago now—I sat next to an old woman on the plane. She wore a long skirt with a long-sleeved blouse, and a heavy wig with a scarf, though it was June. She was the wife of an important rabbi in New York. They had both survived the Holocaust and when she reached for her bag overhead, there were the numbers on her arm. We were talking about famous gardens we both knew in Russia, England, Poland, and France. I told her I’d never had much luck with my own, how they were always a mess, everything straying and overrunning the beds, getting out of hand and defiant. She described the gardens she’d always kept. She spoke of her roses, zinnias, dahlias, the tangle of vines netting over the fence, everything crammed in a too-small space. “You know,” she said in her thick accent, “I love them all. All the weeds and flowers. I keep even the dandelions in.” I remember thinking I recognize that. And I remember feeling shaken by the recognition, the neatness and the wildness unresolved. That she was not, could not be, discerning. I remember staring into the dirty gray weave of the seat in front of me and thinking, uneasily, This is the only way anything will ever make sense to me.

  I love the friend who is slow to talk, whose composure is a hard-won grace, who works to find a rent in the persistent heavy folds and drapes that weeks—indeed whole seasons at a stretch—can be, and laughs despite.

  And I love the one who stands easily close, goes rib to rib, leans in, eyes closed and sniffs and says, “We are all such animals aren’t we?”

  Two minds must state their position, as in any good debate, and fight it out:

  I believe in progress and that we get better.

  And I believe we inhabit a form/countenance/aspect so essential it cannot be altered. (I like the old-fashioned term “bearing,” the idea of a temperament directing our actions.)

  “He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments. Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us”—wrote George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans.

  The woman with the long gray braid, who walks her grandchild to school, ought to cut her hair, I was thinking this morning. The braid is too long and limp and wispy and looks more like a baby squirrel’s tail than a gathered plait, waiting to be undone and let cascade. I thought “terrible to be old”—the sinking, the shuffle, the loss of balance and ease of leaping over curbs . . . but what is it, really, I’m turning away from? Evidence of time as it rests and elaborates in the body? Time commandeering. Offshore detonations rocking the waters. That it’s shameful somehow to be made helpless by time, its scouring away of the individual form one worked so hard, over a lifetime, to constitute. It is the custom of some old women to wear beige—“bone” my grandmother called it. Not “tan” or “ecru.” Not “eggshell.” Not “khaki”—right gear for stalking the land of bones—but “bone.” As if that were a color along the spectrum. Or a charm—so that, disguised as the thing you’ll surely become, the angel of death might pass safely over your house.

  I hated the meekness of that color. Let me never wear “bone” I’d think.

  I, who sit daily in front of a collection of real bones, three animals’ jaw bones with rough, flat planes and holes for cords, and sockets for eyes, all flesh picked, washed, burned, eaten away.

  I just read: “What others might have called the futility of his passion made an additional delight for his imagination. . . .” (George Eliot)

  Well, no.

  And yes.

  Two of my oldest friends just visited, each briefly, and returned home, one to England and one to Italy. I miss them now, and in their absence, know that I will never see them enough in this lifetime.

  And I also feel held by the atmosphere each so recently scented. Right there in my kitchen was the gesture of hers I’d forgotten, long elegant hand at her flushed neck, a moment of restraint before launching her point. And there, still, the sharp tooth that shows when he laughs, and the quick eye that follows the curve of a pear, reddened in one spot low on its rump. So I go back and forth. Bereft/held, bereft/held: my heavy, iambic, two-chambered work.

  And yes, the eidetic moments help.

  Here is a favorite sentence from Ethan Frome, a marvel of lightness and economy: “Once or twice in the past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia’s way of letting things happen without seeming to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase, revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferenc
es.” By the time that first comma arrives, and then the next two which so quickly follow, the route of the whole sentence is cast. I remember my brief anxiety there—feeling the shape of the sentence forming, hoping the second part was up to the task. Of course, that part is up to the task—the whole sentence is clean, spare, beautifully paced. It’s a hinge in the story, too; events turn because of this sentence, loitering intentions ripen, recrudesce at just this syntactical moment. I love this sentence because it points out that a way in which I want to know—as a terrible drive with its end enfolded—will, in fact be dramatized in a much larger field in the story. It’s like a game, reading this sentence. I see the arm cocked and the point let fly. I get a little blinded by sun and step back. I agitate from foot to foot—then catch it like an ampoule of dye, or poison, or perfume tossed from a speeding sled, safely.

  Then, too, there is this sentence from Swann’s Way:She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she felt “well” and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.

  Waterfall! The cool, mossy relief after the sentence’s journey. The long, bumpy roads, perilous switchbacks and travel-dust clouds—washed away instantly! I read faster and faster, breathless, then—“waterfall,” in its solidity and inexplicable arrival. Here is a sentence that withstands me, to which I submit, a sentence that couldn’t have known its own end when it started, as I cannot know its end as I begin reading. And I am wholly delighted by the jittery plunge I must take. By the mirror the sentence becomes, in which I see my own surprise.

  I love a line cast cleanly out, a shape gently filling the neat spot prepared for it.

  And I love a veering, careening ride, the ramble and torque and purifying shock of landing hard.

  Freud tells the story of taking a summer walk in the country with a “taciturn friend,” a “young but already famous poet.” They are ambling along, it’s August 1915, the war’s on, so imagine the overall heaviness of heart in the slow summer air:The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us, but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendor that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.

  But Freud disputes “the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.” Then he tries to figure out how mourning works—since that must be what the two are experiencing, each in his own way, he believes—a mourning over impending death, life’s brevity and fragility. Mourning comes to its own “spontaneous end,” he reasons. “Mourning consume[s] itself ” he says, and leaves us freshened and ready to attach our love to new objects.

  I think Freud must have seen many beautiful nests-with-eggs on that walk to come up with this thought. Is there anything more snugly held, more promising a sign of spring than a surprise cluster of eggs in a nest? I imagine they would have been robins’ eggs, blue of the beloved book of my childhood, Little Bear’s Mother, where first I encountered the color in any meaningful way (as backlit morning playground, then dusky sky, then shadow of the mother over the bear) and was held by it, felt some thirst commence, and drank and drank, and felt, at that stream, the never-enough, never, never, never-enough of pleasure held only briefly still (then gone, but refreshed upon reading—Again! Please, read it again!) Freud saw—must have seen—a nest, and constituted therein his response, which was a kind of rivulet of blue between his friend’s adamant darks. He must have held his own mourning in his own warm hand—that summer marking the first year of the war—until out came an orange-breasted flame from the blue.

  (Often I prefer anger in the face of my own various losses. But too, I have my blue robins’ eggs, and looking at them makes me content. In fact, I collected a bowlful over the past year on the walks I took, sometimes three a day, to quell the factions, to run the warring out of my body.)

  Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one about the size of a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it “popped in” (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool June afternoon, encouraged the weird image’s arrival. I attempted to exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly trinkety and likely to surface (clover, bottle cap, penny) but the reindeer was stubborn.

  I suppose I might dig around a bit, psychewise—perhaps the reindeer is standing in for something delicate and hidden, meaningful in a way I cannot yet understand.

  Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch shot out like a hooked cane into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the fertile place the reindeer sprang from (swampy? tundral?) offered up another image: a cleanly flensed frog. Now the two images were overlapping: the frog’s icy-blue, skinned legs and the whole and intact tiny reindeer.

  Then came the smell of gingerbread, though likely I’m misidentifying some flower’s perfume, and while this whole sensation took place in summer, many wintry things kept adding up.

  To what, though? To what?

  I am of two minds about knowing.

  What if I thought about the images this way: simply, that they exist out there, and embedded in shifting forms, the tender and violent enter me, the moment’s site for such happenings. No irritable reaching after fact and reason, as Keats would say, just Hello Reindeer. Hello Frog. Your absolute smallness. Your unexplained end.

  These images are meaningful /I have no idea what these images mean. And what do I get if I push the real-but-odd pictures up against the nothing-in-hand?

  Maybe a glimpse of the blue flame of an egg.

  That old man kneeling in the woods, come upon as I was walking, crouched low at a fallen tree, hands pressed together—was he okay, resting like any pilgrim might, his scant belongings bundled, eyes closed and face tilted up? I looked to be sure he was praying and hadn’t just fallen, and to see if I should help. It seemed like a loss he was addressing, for he picked the right props—downed tree, rough cane, small parcel—and added to them only himself, a beseeching presence.

  But maybe he had fallen. As in “from grace.”

  Sometimes, against one’s will, a oneness of meaning creeps in.

  Given the choice between, say, a dozen okay chocolates and one small piece of pure Belgian dark, I’ll take the smaller, perfect thing. The brief one-time delicacy. It’s always been this way with me. I’ll eat it at once, no slow rationing-out, and then I’ll live with the fleet abundance and the longing.

  But, too, I have these perfect T-shirts, so well fitting, falling just-so—a whole drawerful I took such care in collecting—that I resist wearing them for fear of using them up and then not-having.

  I’m drawn to the way rust bleeds out around a razor in the rain.

  And I want to pick the razor up so no kid will get hurt.

  I want the stain to
spread.

  And I want no one to run in a mess to the doctor (for I, myself, surprise nail-in-the-foot, once had the awful tetanus shots.)

  I want this perfect lost-barn tint contained in the blade’s corona every time I cross the street to stay right here. (And just for fun?—one of the T-shirts I love and keep safe is the color of that rust, precisely.)

  Recently, while on a walk, I found a letter in the street, handwritten, to a Mrs. G. from Mary D., a Jehovah’s Witness, suggesting another visit and scripture reading (quick, only fifteen minutes, she assures) to ease Mrs. G.’s hurt over the loss of her brother. The letter was beautiful, and ended, “I just wanted you to know that I am still out and will be happy to see you whenever you can make the time—and that’s usually what we have to do—make time because it seem time just don’t allow. Most Sincerely.” I am drawn to the handwriting, a combination of script and print, carefully laid down across plain unlined paper and comfortably sloping, the ease of language, the unselfconscious voice set so directly down on the page, an unmediated mind-to-paper move certain of its task. I wish the letter would go on; I want to hear more of this comforting voice.

  But at home, I hide when the Witnesses come. I want to be left alone in my godless world. I want not to be exhorted or cajoled or handed one thing more for my own good. I am fed best by what is left behind. Detritus, loved and held, picked through. (No pure dark Belgian here.) I’d do well as a crow or a vulture, cleaning, paring, finding succulent what has been overlooked and is moldering.

  The “good word,” okay.

  But not to have to receive it fresh and from on high.