by Lia Purpura
And since you have given it so precisely, sure, I can see the whole scene, but with your blue eyes and not my brown ones, for I don’t recall the moment I met you. Not one thing about it comes back. I have no beginning in mind to refer to. I’m back in town, and you’re back, or rather, have been here all along, and a present moment again knits up its own feel, so that the idea of an end to this time right now—and how soon it will pass!—is nothing I can locate either.
The picture I brought along, of my son and me, cheek to cheek, both of us fake serious-looking and about to laugh—when I showed it to your family at lunch, and said “here’s my boy”—that was just part of the story. I was thinking, there’s my mother’s mouth, my father’s brow, but mostly, that’s my grandmother’s chin. In fact, if I tilt up in a mirror, I can see the set of her jaw, her defiance, mock when we teased, or real when angry or retelling a story in which she persevered or struggled to learn resistance to some form of injustice. I remember, sometimes, being annoyed at the gesture. It came from what I considered (at a sulky thirteen) her narrow repertoire of responses. Predictable, I’d think. Which, of course, I relied on. It made for me an idea about what a grown-up should be—consistent, dependable in her actions and responses.
My friend, I must have things of yours that you’ve lost. There must be something I can give you to hold and embellish. Something as useful and strangely orienting as a glance in a mirror.
What is it of yours I’ve been carrying?
The house is still there, but it’s no longer your family’s. They sold it. “Right out from under me,” you’d say, if you were temperamentally inclined toward bitterness. But you’re not. I remember, even then, you met dissolution with an energy for order and repair. And given the way your own losses composed, you checked mine like a pulse. I was a thing to watch for signs of bruise, and to care for. The gauging, the measuring you did: take my memory of that, if it’s not already an easy possession. How you’d fuss with my scarf, as you did just today before we all went out for a walk in the bitter cold. You tugged it up higher and, I could see, took note of my insufficient beret.
How just now your eye went fast to the small things awry—more soup to be served, plate of cornbread too close to the edge of the table—how you found the shapes of what needed doing and applied precise and practiced responses. How you attended to your very frail mother-in-law—before she could ask for side table, tea, napkin, and blanket—the solicitousness, I remembered, as natural as doing a thing for yourself. Maybe you can use this, too: that you’d get a little faraway when you fussed, the way a mother with many kids fixes one’s zipper while eyeing the wet gloves, messy boots, missing sock of the others she’s soon to move toward. Your fussing was easy to accept. I felt the matter-of-factness settle over, and submitted. I remember thinking, too, that maybe the care was compensatory, learned as a child, out of necessity, in defense, or as an enticement.
Today at lunch there were many things to attend. That your mother-in-law was unsteady and needed a napkin looked very much like my scarf askew, my too-heavy groceries, some shingles to nail, some compost to pitch. Tasks unfolded. Time got all wavy and particulate at once. It settled. And didn’t it unsettle, too.
It made me rub my eyes and blink.
Let me give you this:
That you looked at your mother-in-law, as you must every day, looked right at her and made her thus real, as anyone is more real when seen and attended; that you kept seeing her back into herself, whoever she was, or was just then becoming.
On Tools
That wood won’t work. It was chainsawed roughly by someone who had no eye for logs, and now it can’t be split. It’s piled by the side of the road in squat disks like kinged checkers, game over. I myself do not cut wood, but review this situation through the eyes of a friend whose pretty impressive woodpile I’ve seen in a photo he sent. All that wood stacked against the shed—enough for a winter, I guessed. Six cords, he refined. Later came the word limb (as a verb) in conversation. And when I said “ax” and he corrected with “maul” (not really a minor adjustment), choice emerged, the field of cutting enlarged and was no longer the simple stock act of cartoons. Hatchet arose. I imagined the restive, neatly hung options lining the shed in the photo. (“Splitting mauls come in four-pound increments: eight, twelve, sixteen—mine is sixteen; between maul and ax, the ax is more versatile: slimmer, lighter, sharper.... A maul doesn’t have to be very sharp. It doesn’t cut, it just pries,” he writes, going on about functions and choices, since I asked.)
I started to notice my neighbors’ woodpiles, the good, precise stacks and the teetery ones; that people use bins, frames, or canvas haulers; supply varies greatly, from modest stacks for the occasional fire to piles for serious heating; kids mess up the piles substantially, borrowing for clubhouses and skateboard jumps. Here in Baltimore, wood arrives by delivery in fall and sits at the curb until people get around to stacking on weekends.
But about those sharp quarter rounds (the novice’s love of new words in the mouth): someone made them happen. If I stick with this a little longer, I might have a chance, in conversation, to use the phrase put up wood (like put up preserves) now that I know that’s what you call it. And with more time still, I could memorize which wood contains the most BTUs per cord, though I’m finding no helpful acronym for (starting with the highest density) Oak, Ash, Maple, Birch, Poplar, Aspen, Pine.
Recently I had a chance to try it myself. It wasn’t complicated and I pretty much managed, but awkwardly. My musculature isn’t trained for the task; nothing in my body’s habituated that way. If I had a reason to practice splitting (like, say, a fireplace) I might become good. But my arcs through air were all a mess. I couldn’t control the ax very well—it kept wobbling out of the orbit I intended. The handle felt too long and unbalanced and I couldn’t find the space in air that opened for the blade. I suspect that when you’re on, there’s a groove the blade remembers, and a fissile core awaiting release that calls the right motion down.
Sometimes I look at people (or read certain books) and think (not unkindly, just with disappointment): oh, a first-time gesture—say, at a state fair, at one of those booths where guys try to impress their girlfriends by swinging a mock but heavy sledgehammer that, if landed hard enough on the little pad, raises a lever, mercury-in-a-thermometer style, and hits a red bell at the top. Such gestures are clumsy and haven’t yet found even a jerky-effective method. They’re all just sloppy force asserted. Every now and then someone comes by and it’s clear, you can see: he actually does this in the course of a day. The language is there, the movements (both the transitional and the primary) are refined or quirky; either way, a system has been worked out. (Of course the carnie running the game can nail the spot and ring the bell, over and over, though he isn’t a big guy; he just knows the sweet place, wherever it is, off-center or flat-on. He swings his rubbery sledgehammer up, lets it hang at the zenith just for a second, then the weight of the head angles into its practiced fall. You can’t help but envy the guy. The mild, egressive huh of breath, how he seems to both find and create the arc, invisible to others. His ease is seductive and even if he is reeky, stuporous, snarly, even if swindle underscores his flattery—come on, big guy, try for the lady—I fall a little for him; for the forms of effort naturalized, for the fluencies his body knows just the occasion for.)
A tool can so easily be considered wrong or broken (or rigged, if you’re in a bad mood at a fair) until one knows how to use it well (finds a grip, a stance that suits, shifts into a callused spot, performs a three-step predance move, swipes a forehead free of sweat). Or it might be considered too heavy when it’s not too heavy at all (you just need the recursive angle, and to waggle into the vector that wants you, sidelong or square-on, etc., depending entirely on the way you’re keyed to gravity). You might consider the material you’re working on bad, rank, unyielding, anomic, unless you come to know its very particular features, which means you can look like a regular person, walking,
say, down 5th Avenue in New York but at the same time recite, if called upon to do so, very solid facts about a tool and its use. People who know such stuff, who possess a sensitivity to tools and to the way jobs like to be done, think of such things as daily, as rote, what you learned as a kid. Just work. See below, from a very long letter on wood from the friend who indulges my interest in woodpiles: Ponderosa pine, unless it’s knotty, splits in clean, straight lines, one swing of the maul, usually. A knot is merely1 a branch that started when the tree was young, near the center, and grew outward with the tree so that it interrupts the grain of the wood with a cross-directional grain and serves to bind the log together. Some wood has crooked grains—cottonwood, Siberian elm—and is so difficult to split I don’t bother to cut it. But if a maul doesn’t work, you can go to a wedge,2 which is a slug of metal about a foot long widening from bottom to top that you drive with a sledgehammer. If you try to use a splitting maul on too-knotty/crooked/ grained wood, it never penetrates the fibers far enough to split and you can hit all day and never manage it.3 Ash is more difficult than pine, but usually straight-grained, so it may resist the first stroke4 and maybe the second, but then suddenly breaks apart. Since oak is the hardest wood, if you get a piece where the grain runs in spirals,5 it may take a dozen blows 6 to drive even a wedge far enough in to separate the stump. (No wonder the oak creaks so. The fibers make these small internal noises, so much quieter than the metal-on-metal hammer blow, so much more expressive.)
If you know your stuff, as my friend does, you get to ponder the dialects of wood; you get to put things together about certain fibers being expressive—and that gets to be offhand, parenthetical. Such thoughts are embellishments, and intimacies. Footnotes show discipleship, the drive to get to the bottom of, the urge to make a path by which one comes to inhabit an idea for herself. Inside those parentheses though, a person who knows stuff stops for a minute, reviews the familiar scene afresh. Finds all that he didn’t know he knew. Reflects. Surprises himself. Gets, as is often said about such moments of flight and discovery, poetic.
Shit’s Beautiful
I don’t mean this groovily, as in “wow dude, a lot of goodness out there,” or as a reprieve (“it could’ve been a bad scene, but I woke up feeling fine”) or as an exhortation to a sad friend to come on and snap out of it. I mean nothing existential, collective, abstract. I mean, exactly, yours and mine.
I hardly know where to start, in praise.
How about with the functioning system: the grinding, lubricating, and dissolving of food en route to the stomach, set below densities of liver and pancreas; the embellishment of gall bladder (branching like a tethered cloud) and appendix (brief, floating archipelago); the large and small intestines folding, switchbacking, before the sideroom of bladder, all ending in the neat funnel of anus. And the systems of deconstructions , mixing, moving, separating, reducing, so as to build anew; nerves instructing muscles to swallow; storage facilities tucked and filling; enzymes and hormones triggering motion/reestablishing stasis; mucosae protecting; vast surfaces of villi absorbing nutrients; and the recognition systems for starch, sugar, fiber, protein, fat, vitamins, salt, and water, each at their appointed moment, extracting, contributing. The final secreting, compacting, and binding. The folds, slopes, and lobes in consort. The duties prescribed. The sequences ordered, so extrusions of matter are detoxified, synthesized, and rolled out in shapes that mimic the form of the body that made them in wellness—the system, the whole, a marvel of containment and timing. Such matter compelled through a body, such abundantly motile matter passing the retiary, the loci, the conundra of folds and slopes and lobes: an amazement.
I’m going to work on the elegance of shit. Why can’t it be so? The compact forms expressive, responsive—as architect Louis Sullivan wrote, “A proper building grows naturally, logically, and poetically out of all its conditions.”
Indeed, it’s hard to know the wealth you’re born into, until it’s compromised or taken away. Until the crash comes, the doors close, and gates seal against you, the comings and goings no longer freely, unthinkingly performed.
I’m not the kind of person, who, coming home, can’t wait to get into her sweats. I’m not a comfy, earth-mother type (though I do make granola and sometimes bread.) In fact, I’d be happy to disappear now and not have you consider my body at all, but since it’s my sole point of reference, let me say without too much embellishment: the system, shut down, is a nightmare of ceasings. If you haven’t encountered the language yet, it goes varices, tears, inflammations, fissures. Ruptures. Bleeding (internal and ex-). And for others, it’s pouchings, cramps, kinks, misrouted fluids, excessive trapped air, even auto-immunological destruction.
But in the presense of order and balance, when controls persist and mechanisms of transmission maintain and adjust, divide and release, when the billions and billions of microvilli sway and stir for nutrients, when your own two to three gallons of food and liquid process down to a mere twelve ounces of waste a day—what you’re left with is shit. I use the unlovely word for it. Of course, there is no lovely word (though we have in abundance the clinical and cloying), but neither am I shying from this one, all the better to force the issue—resistance—into view. All systems in accord—spit, knock wood—what’s left is the body’s decision: that’s enough, and good-bye to the rest, to all we don’t need, that, nevertheless, like the sturdiest bridge, the fiftieth sketch, made a path to the moment where the best has been culled, the excess released, all that lent itself in right measure, let go.
I think I have a well-developed sense of modesty. I wear a bathrobe (embroidered with dragons, okay, but still: coverage). I don’t wear the low-cut, the too-tight to work. This foray into shit is not about letting it all hang out as people used to say. It’s that gratitude makes a body earnest in its expression: “Blessed are you, The Architect... who shaped the human being with wisdom, making for us all the openings and vessels of the body. It is revealed and known . . . that if one of these passageways be open when it should be closed, or blocked up when it should be free, one could not stay alive or stand before you. . . .” So goes the morning blessing in the Jewish prayer book: that we might appreciate health in its presence, not only in its absence.
Consider the weird pleasure of eating durians, natto, fermented shark—things custardy-rotten, ammonia-preserved, softened and richening in their decay. The haut goût of game, the faisande— that quality, ripeness, character so few foods offer today. The pleasure in a chunk of Pont-l’Évêque, of Pié d’Angloys, of Époisses (fantastic—and banned from all public transport in France). A smear of Taleggio on good, hard bread is a training in complexity. We train for complexity on the way in, the scents reinterpreted, overriden, desire teased onto a certain lane, the unlikely thing sought, carefully tended, dosed out on special occasions. About such tastes my son once asked: why in life do we avoid them and in cheese actually want them? About madness I recently read: “Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen—a force that both chastened and exalted her.” Chastened /exalted—what a fragile state, the awful and ecstatic a tremor apart, the line between them scoured away by the strange light they share. Such delicacies are specially plated, kept apart from other tastes. Priced for discerning. Rare. Seasonal. Cultivated. Strange.
At low tide on Long Island when I was a kid, I’d find all kinds of things washed up on shore. Before all the plastic there was much more beach glass. I collected mostly the buffed blue and green pieces (so bright and jeweled in water and sun, so disappointing at home, dried, on a shelf) but what I really liked to see were the creatures with soft, pale, brownish-blue or pink, slippery bodies. Little worm-forms nestled in tide-pools, sometimes in shells, half in and half out, poking around with their single leg or siphoning up some colloidal treat and exhaling the sandy rest. Here were the tenderest, most secret bodies—clams of all sorts, and scallops whose half-shells suggested a tiny Venus might be nearby. There were barnacles and mussels still att
ached to their posts, rocks, planks, tangles of seaweed, vital and bubbling, closing up shop when touched, and then after a long while (how such forms taught a child patience) opening and venturing shyly out again.
Oysters are alive in this twitchy way on their half shell, bedded in ice. I order them rarely, and last time I did, I was very restrained. I ate my small portion of Rappahannocks and drank a very cold, bright cava. I held in my mouth, against my back teeth, each plump, quivery body and pushed it around, not chewing exactly, but not rushing it down. Each oyster pooled in a salty ingle, a sensation that quieted the moment, blurred it with sea spray, compacted the wide, oceanic present into a dense, ferrousy body which I then swallowed, and whose essence I held like a breath, as a fullness until I could surface and prepare for the next fleshy wave, and the next and the next.
Such is the pleasure of entry sustained.
Now consider the opposite, also complex, but a pleasure we aren’t accustomed to naming. Not unless you’re a high school boy, so I’m told, who with friends compares shits, ranking the best one, where and when it was taken. Thus roughening up the sensation of pleasure, but nevertheless, admitting it. I’m not advocating such coarsening or that the rest of us rescind our discretion; just noting the collective silence, so you can nod in assent, continue not-discussing-it, and yet know-what-I-mean. There are so many forms of unsung release, as when a headache lifts, or a fever, and the easing is so terrifically pronounced, though you’re simply returning to stasis, your usual, everyday, pain-free state. But daily, should you choose to acknowledge it, such pleasure is available. For a moment, probably morning. Probably brief. Maybe hard-won. Moved on quickly from, to other more mentionable pleasures and tasks of the day.
