On Looking: Essays Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Lia Purpura

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Autopsy Report

  On Aesthetics

  On Form

  Recurrences/Concurrences

  Brown

  Sugar Eggs: A Reverie

  The Pin

  Red: An Invocation

  The Smallest Woman in the World

  The Space Between

  Coming to See

  Falling Houses: mise-en-scene

  Glaciology

  Spires

  On Invisibility

  On Praise

  On Not Hurting a Fly: A Memorial

  On Looking Away: A Panoramic

  NOTES

  THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Also by Lia Purpura

  Increase (essays)

  Stone Sky Lifting (poems)

  The Brighter the Veil (poems)

  Poems of Grzegorz Musial (translations)

  For Jed

  Every object, well contemplated, creates an organ for its perception.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  . . . I was also caught by absence in all its forms.

  —Paul Eluard

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am grateful to the editors of the following journals in which these essays first appeared:

  Agni Magazine: “Glaciology”

  Crazyhorse: “Falling Houses: mise-en-scene”; “The Pin”

  Ecotone: “The Space Between”

  Fourth Genre: “Spires”

  Iowa Review: “On Aesthetics”; “Autopsy Report”; “On Not Hurting a Fly: A Memorial”; “The Smallest Woman in the World”; “On Form”

  The Journal: “On Invisibility”

  Quarterly West: “Coming to See”

  Seneca Review: “Red: An Invocation”

  Sonora Review: “On Looking Away: A Panoramic”

  “Glaciology” appeared in the 2006 Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses.

  For expert reconnaissance, thanks to Kristin Kearby, Ashley Markiewicz, Jason McCullough, Sarah Sandoski, and John Wixted.

  I deeply appreciate the time for work and occasions for solitude made possible by The National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Thurber House, The Center for Humanities at Loyola College, and my family.

  To A.V. Christie, Jed Gaylin, and Maddalena Purpura, my ongoing thanks for your uncompromising honesty and artistry.

  Autopsy Report

  I wish I understood the beauty

  in leaves falling. To whom

  are we beautiful

  as we go?

  —David Ignatow

  I shall begin with the chests of drowned men, bound with ropes and diesel-slicked. Their ears sludge-filled. Their legs mud-smeared. Asleep below deck when a freighter hit and the river rose inside their tug. Their lashes white with river silt.

  I shall stand beside sharp pelvic bones, his mod hip-huggers stretched tightly between them. His ribs like steppes, ice-shelves, sandstone. His wide-open mouth, where a last breath came out. And there at his feet, the stuff of his death: a near-empty bottle of red cough syrup, yellow-labeled and bagged by police.

  I shall touch, while no one is looking, the perfect cornrows, the jacket’s wet collar. Soaked black with blood, his stiffening sleeve. And where the bullets passed neatly through, the pattern when his shirt’s uncrumpled: four or five holes like ragged stars, or a child’s cut-out snowflake.

  I shall note the blue earring, a swirled, lapis ball in the old, yellowed man’s ear, his underwear yellowed, his sunken face taut. The amber and topaz half-empty fifths his landlord found and gave to police.

  The twenty-year alcoholic before us, a businessman. All the prescriptions for his hypertension, bagged and unused near his black-socked, gold-toed foot. The first button open on his neat, white shirt and, I shall confirm, the requisite pen in the pocket neatly clamped in.

  “Oh no,” an assistant says. The gospel station’s softly on, floaty in its mild joy; it’s 7:45 on a rainy Sunday morning and so far I’m the only visitor. Turning briefly to me, he asks, “What did you come here for?”

  Then, “Oh no,” he says again, “no more eighteen-year-olds,” as he stops at the first body, surveying. Soon, the doctors gather in the hall, finish their donuts, scrub, suit up, begin to read from the police reports, the facts meditative as any rote practice, marking and measuring, preparing ritual ground: The last person to see him alive was his girlfriend. History: bipolar. Suspected: OD, heroin. “Something too pure is killing these kids in the county,” the doctor says. Of the boy’s house, the report states “nice,” “middle class” and “the deceased’s bedroom is cluttered and dirty.” Multiple generations at home. Bottle caps with resin in the trash. And here is a silver soup spoon, blue-black from the flame, encrusted where he cooked the stuff, its graceful stem embellished for nothing. As his body is—beautiful now, for nothing. Is olive-skinned, muscled, nicely proportioned. No, I shall say it, is stunning, as it turns to marble before us.

  We walk back to the first body, unmingling stories. They divide up the bodies. They take the clothes off.

  What I thought before seeing it all: never again will I know the body as I do now.

  And how, exactly, is that?

  Have I thought of the body as sanctuary? A safe, closed place like the ark from which the Torah is taken and laid out on a table to be unscrolled. The two sides parted, opened like, soon I’d know, a rib cage, that a hand with a sharp-tipped pointer might lead the way over, reading toward depth.

  Here’s the truth: when I first saw the bodies, I laughed out loud. The laugh burst forth, I could not stop it. Forgive me, I thought even then, but the scene, the weird gestures looked entirely staged. Such a response is sure measure of expectations; sure proof I held other images dear: shrouds, perhaps? Veils? A pall hanging (and though I’ve never seen a pall, I know it is “cast over,” that it shadows all that it touches). Had I assumed crisp sheets drawn up, as in surgery, to section off an operating theater around the site of death? Had somewhere an ideal been lodged: arms at sides in the position of sleep (not so bird-like, jutting, rigid); faces placid (mouths not slack, not black, empty sockets, dry shafts down, archeological, beckoning, unquiet).

  Was I awaiting some sign of passage, the strains of ceremony slapping in its wake? (There was the dime the police searched for, evidence caught in the body bag, bright and mud-smeared, I didn’t point out. How meager against the royal cats, well-fed and gold-haltered, the canopic jars holding royal organs, the granaries built for the beautiful pharaohs . . . leave the dime in, I thought, that the boatman might row him across.)

  Did I expect, finally, the solemnity of procession? Death gowned and dancing, scythe raised and cape blowing, leading the others, at dusk, over a mountain. In silhouette. Fully cinematic.

  And now that I’ve admitted laughing, I shall admit this, more unexpected, still:

  When the assistants opened the first body up, what stepped forth, unbidden, was calm.

  It was in the assistants’ manner of touching their material, their work, that delicacy. The precise, rote gestures feeling space and resistance; adjusting the arc of a blade to the bodies’ proportions; cupping and weighing, knowing the slippage, anticipating it; the pressure, the estimate, the sure, careful exchange of hand and knife, the gesture performed so efficiently it looked like habit: easy, inevitable.

  The calm came to me while the skin behind the ears and across the base of the skull was cut from its bluish integument. While the scalp was folded up and over the face like a towel, like a compress draped over sore eyes. Whi
le the skull was sawed open and a quarter of it lifted away, dust flying, the assistants working without masks. It was calm that came forth while the brain was removed, while the brain, heavy and gray and wet, was fileted with an enormous knife, one hand on top to keep it from jiggling. While the doctor found the ragged lesion in the thalmus and ruled the cause of death hypertension—not alcoholism. Calm, while the brain was slipped into a jar, and the skull refitted, the skin pulled back over to hold it all in again.

  I suppose they expected queasiness, fear, short, labored breath—all death’s effect. That I’d back away. That after the first, I’d have seen enough. Or the tears that followed fast, after the laughter—for the waste, the fine bones, because these were sons or fathers or would never be fathers—perhaps they expected the tears to return?

  But when the bodies were opened up—how can I say this? The opening was familiar. As if I’d known before, this . . . what? Language? Like a dialect spoken only in childhood, for a short time with old-world relatives, and heard again many years later, the gist of it all was sensible. And though I couldn’t reply, meanings hung on. A shapeliness of thought was apparent, all inflection and lilt and tonal suggestion.

  Nothing was too intimate: not the leaves stuck to the crewman’s thigh, and higher up, caught in the leg of his underwear; the captain’s red long johns and soaked, muddy sock. Their big stomachs and how reliably strong they still looked. Not the diesel fuel slicking their faces, stinking the building, dizzying us, nor the pale, wrinkled soles of one’s foot, water-logged. Not the hair braided by some woman’s hands, her knuckles hard against his head. The quarter-sized hole in his twisted, gray sweat sock, sock he pulled on that morning, or afternoon, or whenever he rose while he lived and dressed without a thought to dressing.

  Not the dime the police found and bagged. The buckshot pockmarking his face, his young face, the buccal fat still high, rounded and thick. Nothing was unfamiliar in the too-bright room. Not the men’s nakedness, although I have never seen twelve men, naked, before me. Not the method by which the paths of bullets were measured: rods of different lengths pushed through each hole—I had to stop counting there were so many—until one came out the other side.

  Not the phrase “exit wound.”

  And though I’d never seen a bullet hole, of course it would be shallow as the tissue underneath swelled uselessly back together. Of course blood pooled each blue-burnt circumference. Of course, I remember thinking.

  The purpose the work comprised, the opening, was familiar.

  It was familiar to see the body opened.

  Because in giving birth, I knew the body opened beyond itself?

  Because I have been opened, enough times now in surgery, once the whole length of me, and there are hundreds of stitches?

  Then, when everything was lifted out—the mass of organs held in the arms, a cornucopia of dripping fruits hoisted to the hanging scale—there was the spine. I could look straight through the empty body, and there, as if buried in wet, red earth, there was the white length of spine. Shields of ribs were sawed out and saved to fix back into place. There were the yellow layers of fat, yellow as a cartoon sun, as sweet cream butter, laid thinly on some, in slabs on others. There were the ice-blue casings of large intestines, the small sloshing stomach, transparent, to be drained. The bladder, hidden, but pulled into view for my sake and cupped in hand like a water balloon. Cracks and snappings. The whisking and shushing of knives over skin, a sound like tearing silk. The snipping. The measuring jars filled with cubed liver. The intercostal blood vessel pulled out like a basted hem. The perforating branches of the internal thoracic artery leaving little holes behind in the muscle like a child’s lace-up board. The mitral valves sealing like the lids of ice cream cups. And heavy in the doctor’s hand, the spleen, shining, as if pulled from a river.

  How easily the body opens.

  How with difficulty does the mouth in awe, in praise. For there are words I cannot say.

  If looking, though, is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer, it is the sole practice I had available to me as a child. By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare. Among my parents’ art, their work, I moved in fields of color and gesture, cut parts built to make up wholes: mannequin heads adorned with beads; plaster food so real, so hard the mashed potatoes hurt, and painted sandwiches of sponge grew stiff and scratched. Waxed fibers with feathers twisted into vessels. Lips and mouths and necks of clay were spun and pulled into being in air. With the play of distance, with hues close up, paintings roughened with weaves, softened with water, oil, turpentine, greens, fleshes, families of shapes grew until—better than the bodies of clouds, these forms stayed put—forms spoke, bent toward, nodded so that they came to happen again and again, and I played among them in their sight. And what went on between us was ineffable, untold and this was the silent part of my life as a child.

  I never thought to say, or call this “God,” which even then sounded like shorthand, a refusal to be speechless in the face of occurrences, shapes, gestures happening daily, and daily reconstituting sight. “God,” the very attitude of the word—for the lives of words were also palpable to me—was pushy. Impatient. Quantifiable. A call to jettison the issue, the only issue as I understood it: the unknowable certainty of being alive, of being a body untethered from origin, untethered from end, but also so terribly here.

  And here—for we went out to see often—was once constituted by enormous, black, elegaic shapes closed between black gashes or bars. And in the same day, here was also curved, colored shapes, airborne and hung from wire, like, ah! muted, lobed organs, so that here could be at once a gesture of mourning and a gesture of ease.

  I went home and showered, showered and scrubbed in hottest water and threw away the old shoes I’d worn. Later that day, at the grocery store among the other shoppers, I saw all the scalps turned over faces, everyone’s face made raw and meatlike, the sleek curves of skulls and bony plates exposed. I saw where to draw the knife down the chest to make the Y that would reveal.

  I’d seen how easily we open, our skin not at all the boundary we’re convinced of as we bump into each other and excuse ourselves. I’d seen how small a thing gone wrong need be: one sip, just one too many, mere ounces of water in the lungs too much. And the woman in front of me on the check-out line, the pale tendons in her neck, the fibers of muscle wrapping bone below her wool collar, her kidneys backed against my cart—how her spleen, so unexpectedly high in the body, was marked precisely by the orange flower on her sweater! And after seeing the assistants gather the organs up in their arms and arrange them on the aluminum table, after seeing such abundance there—here, too, was abundance: pyramids of lemons, red-netted sacks of oranges and papery onions, bananas fitting curve to curve, the dusty skins of grapes, translucent greens, dark roses, heavy purples.

  Then, stepping out into the street with my bags, everything fresh and washed in the cold March rain, there was that scent hanging in the air—a fine film of it lingered, and I knew it to be the milky blueness I saw, just hours ago, cut free and swaying, barest breath and tether. That scrim, an opacity, clung to everyone, though they kept walking to cars, lifting and buckling children in. Packing their trunks, returning their carts. Yes, everything looked as it always had—bright and pearly, lush and arterial after the rain.

  On Aesthetics

  It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

  —Albert Einstein

  There was a time, more than ten years ago now, when riding the subway was nearly impossible. Suddenly, for about a week, I could no longer unthinkingly press my body so close to the bodies of others. It was not disgust, nor the summer heat, but a surprising and originless fear. I was managing, but one afternoon on the Uptown Express, slowly, and with great clarity, everyone’s face turned ratlike and sharp. Each face was vicious, unpredictable, hungry. And m
ine was the single soft face looking on, at once too close and isolated from the horror everyone was. By 34th Street, after only a few stops, I had to get off and walk the rest of the way to the Upper West Side where I was staying with my friend.

  I returned to normal rather quickly after that incident.

  Now that I’m a mother, except for being weird with exhaustion at times, nothing like this has happened since.

  Once I did something I can still barely speak of; I know, now, with certainty, it is nothing I-the-mother would ever do again—or rather, fail to do. In a public bathroom at a mall, a little girl was spanked and shaken for not washing her hands before eating. And though I stood near, washing my own hands, I could not dissolve the space between us, the mother, the girl, and me, could not make the girl’s hunger mine, move my hand into the crumpled bag of yellow popcorn, take the sheen of fake oily butter onto my fingers, lick the sheen off as she did, nor could I swell with rage like the mother, then break and release order, at any cost, into place. I mean to say I did nothing, said nothing at all. And that it was a failure of heart and imagination.

  I left the bathroom feeling so weighted and slow, so stuck at the site of my failure that everywhere I went that day, the bathroom’s dank, fake-floral scent, its too-bright air followed and dulled me further.