On Looking: Essays Read online

  I circled around again. On one side, the body was perfect, but then on the other, when I crossed over, there was the hole come upon like disbelief, the perfect jawbone pierced through, collapsed in. The hole like a cave. Like a cup. Like an ear, half-drowned and mud-filled. The darkness there was seeping pink. The pink underneath was—I couldn’t tell what. So I stayed with the body. So I kept looking in.

  On Looking Away: A Panoramic

  Once I saw:

  at an exhibition, balanced on its points, a blowfish, inflated, shellacked. Its empty stomach was mottled pink, brown, and cream. Its mouth was open, the lips a thin, stretched O of surprise. So easy someone had made it to forget the working insides, to forget, so we might tilt toward the light a hollow balloon of pleasure. Dip safely a finger into the spaces between flared needles.

  And once . . .

  But it wasn’t just once. There are so many things to consider looking away from.

  Once an emerald dragonfly landed in front of me on a cashier’s thin arm. Its jittery sheen articulated as she moved and made her smaller by that trick, partial, and barely seen.

  Tattoos are sad things. So one-time-only. The need to be marked so openly displayed and then, well, that little picture is all you get. And how much the poor image is meant to hold: such a record of need, all painstaking decision or quick impetuousness recorded on the skin. The snapshot of the big event and not the big event itself (the one that lives behind the skin, always, always unseen) makes anyone forever the guy with his old war stories. About Johnnie. Remember him? True love you had for that guy. Like a brother . . . wife gave me his medal . . . . Heraldry, desire, homage crushed down to shamrock, Tasmanian devil, or, demurely—let’s not go too far, let’s not go crazy—a sweet-pea vine at the ankle. Muted registers, in case of disappointment. Muted regions of the body, in case of having-to-learn-to-live-with.

  Once I saw them.

  But how that came to be involves a complicated set of strategies, the history of our own Office of War Information, a break with the Geneva Conventions. I saw the bloated faces of the evil tyrant’s sons. Browned. Potatoed. Like things hauled from saltwater. It must be that proof is dilatory, elastic, as expansive as the very early morning hours devoted to a single task. After all, “It is not a practice the United States engages in on a normal basis” said Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. And “I honestly believe that these two are particularly bad characters, and that it’s important for the Iraqi people to see them, to know they’re gone, to know they’re dead and to know they’re not coming back.” For this purpose the faces are shown, for the purpose of indentifying monsters. For surely monsters look like monsters—see? Enduringly. And as surely, there is a child in bed, insistent, but, but-ing in the buttery light of happy endings: what about the troll/witch/dragon—are they really dead? Surely there is a mother imposing sleep now, shhhh. (And surely, the child—didn’t you?—gathers the loose threads of the story into her hand, since threads show in even the best stories, and asks: what happened to the beanstalk after? And: did they eat the witch they kicked into the oven? And: aren’t there more witches out there? I know this story goes on, thinks the child. . . . )

  Once I saw her.

  But then, just like that, the next summer she was gone. When I called the director of the state fair, his secretary told me that people complained and said she was inappropriate and was being exploited. In her air-conditioned trailer with her newspaper and knitting, sitting, tiny legs crossed, tiny bonnet of blue calico and little calico apron kindling questions (how old is she? is she from this century? were, maybe, people smaller then?). The seat a little too high, just an inch, so her feet would dangle, making her even more specimenlike. Polite yet brief about the questions. Oh, she was a lovely person, and she liked her work and chose to do it, the state fair director’s secretary told me. Velvet rope between her and the quiet people filing by. Nothing about her left you exactly breathless. Gravitational issues though: the onlookers’ sudden, unexpected shame, embarrassment—no clue that this would happen—like entering a river, and suddenly the river is alive, minnows uncomfortably nibbling at toes, the current tugging. Soon an iciness not at all refreshing.

  Most everyone hurried through.

  One might resist:

  touching a chicken to clean it, and retreat from its smallness and loose, bumpy skin where once feathers were and were scalded off. One might refuse the articulated movement of its legs while washing it under the water in the sink and still eat the chicken. Cooked by another: Mediterranean. Fantastique. Wined and buttered breast and thigh and leg transformed. Under pineapple, so you don’t have to see. And can finally eat.

  One might resist:

  the article about a mother, hot water, steel wool, her child. One might resist the phrase “her child.” One might start to read, and knowing at once what’s coming, seeing where it’s going (bathtub, peroxide, wound, and squirt) turn away. Feel the sheer drop-off, the height scaled fast and the sharp rocks shift underfoot. One might keep the article, file it, because all around the air is thinning. Because such helplessness splinters anyone. If you’re not a mother, or a father, you don’t know what it’s like to want—and maybe only once, and maybe only glancingly—to do anything, anything to make the crying stop, to stop your own helplessness in the face of it. How, even if only for a moment, you feel broken apart. And that’s when the shards start flying.

  Remember the last time you had a speck in the eye? How you could think of nothing else?

  But you closed your eyes to stop the irritation.

  But you took a deep breath and the moment passed.

  Right?

  Here is a boy whose eye could be fixed. In the West. In America. But in the photo it’s slipping inward. And here is his mother whose black, body-long burqa, when she squats, makes her look like a mountain. A mountain of slag from a freshly dug ditch. Whose entire face is covered with meshing. Here is a mother whose eyes are graphed, whose cheek is graphed when he flies to her and presses hard for a kiss. What is a kiss through mesh—a graphed breath? Here is a mother who cannot find the eyes of her son. Here is a boy with a mountain for a mother. A newspaper lays these things before you, at your feet—good dog—in black and white, and black and white allows the incremental 1-2-3 of understanding. A reader says I see, I see. Then leaves. For orange juice. Water. Small pleasures/ consolations of tea.

  If I am going to stay with these children (the girl’s name is Sylena), I have to consider what they turn towards. Heliotropically. Tiny, back-bent supplicants searching under beds, around corners: Mom, where are you? Child-as-heliostat fixed to reflect the sun’s rays, continuously, even as the sun turns away. And heliotropes: any kind of small, reddish-purple flower from Heliopolis, city of ruins, ruined, with a modern city superimposed, oh site of hurry and bustle, with ghost words and echoes, our ears too dulled to gauge a cry—of protest? exhaustion? hunger rising? And here, still standing in the city, my city, the story of the terrible bathtub, the story a reader might choose—I chose, because I am on trial here—to pass over one recent morning, to concentrate instead on the interesting demolition, 10th Avenue, the whole west side of the building torn off, the rooms like holes, empty, except for one.

  With a white bathtub.

  That stops me.

  Ladder built back to the scene I keep turning away from.

  The tub is clean. Very clean of the bodies (her body) (Sylena’s) (and the soaps and towels heaped on the floor would have been wet, and worse). (And here comes the wet bed that the child didn’t, didn’t mean to, that I couldn’t, I cannot... fix, clean. Fold away.)

  And look! There are Murphy beds, still, in this part of town. See them in the torn up apartments! Remember the velvet ropes across the rooms in the Tenement Museum and the Murphy beds there. I remember that... safely now. I’m safe for now.

  I paid my admission.

  Then this comes:

  How would all the tenement children live in just two rooms?


  Crammed, I suppose. Crammed into, like these specimens I’m here to see, I’m not turning away from. Here in the museum of things gone terribly wrong, the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities, in Philadelphia. All the specimens: a loud carbuncle in plaster, on the back of a neck, like a scream. A smallpox pustule like an open mouth, its lips pulled down in sorrow in the photograph. The (forgive me) macaroni & cheese-with-ketchup face of a syphilitic. The gorgeous phrase “cavity of the sacrum” followed by photos of Frederik Ruysch’s tiny, mounted fetal skeletons, some playing miniature bone-and-ligament violins, some jarred and injected with wax, talc, cinnabar, oil of lavendar, alcohol, black pepper, colored pigments to better illustrate the transcience of life and other allegorical lessons. And some he draped with embroidered lace. And to some he gave a mesentery handkerchief to accompany postures of grief.

  The word caries. The words phial and lancet and paregoric. And mercury pastille.

  One fetus—like Da Vinci’s Hyperion Man, limbs out to measure the breadth of the known universe with its body—is really one star of conjoined twins, a head at either end and arms and legs as shining points. A star in the process of exploding, but caught. A star that didn’t explode at all. Among such pinkness and tension and sadness, among the weightless beings strung up and clamped to best show their features, heads bent below a meniscus of poison, heads cresting the terrible solutions—I sat down. I stepped into their sleep.

  And when I peered around to see their open backs, where the seam of them split, and the heat clanked on in the ancient radiators, and a toilet somewhere loudly flushed and the lobby voices were pistons churning the room . . . what was the difference, sitting with?

  I read the medieval explanation about these bodies: God’s anger. The Devil’s hand at work. Some fear, danger, tragedy striking a mother straight through to her child. I looked and looked past reason to the useless necks again. To sit with you have to look into the gap in your understanding, not drive the conversation, not know where it’s going. Not know beforehand at all where it’s heading. I read once, there is a quality of legend about freaks . . . like a person in a fairy tale who stops and demands that you answer a riddle. That’s the space. That open field, where you’re sitting with, and don’t have the answer, but an atmosphere of response is forming.

  I’m reading about a death-row inmate called “Little Lew.” And though here he is, framed in his neat newspaper photo, he is hard to see for all his running—away from home at seven, then a little blur escaping from juvenile detention. Little Lew, who, by twelve, was already a father. (He’s flying now.) Who loved guns from early on (“I can’t even explain why. Just had to have one.”). At 5’3” and 117 pounds, he’s feather-blown. Of his weight, say Welter: “to roll,” “to roll about, as in mud,” and used figuratively as in: “they weltered in sin.” “To be soaked, stained or bathed,” as in: “the corpses weltered in their own blood.” As in: “Leoma Chmielewski,” after Lew shot her in the face during a robbery.

  It took nine corrections officers to hold him down while the IV tubes were inserted in his arms.

  The prisons’ chief said he would have preferred not to have cameras involved in the execution process.

  Of the drugs used to anesthetize, paralyze, and kill (sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride), the first, the article states, can mask symptoms of an agonizing death by suffocation. It’s banned by the American Veterinary Medical Association.

  There were no signs that Williams suffered “once his struggles ceased” the article continues. “But that does not mean he did not feel pain” the article also reads.

  Little kids playing hide-and-seek close their eyes and suppose no one can see them.

  Safe, safe, safe.

  Here’s Little Lew’s little picture, stamp-sized on page 1 of the paper. Below it See Killer p. A2, Columbus Dispatch, no picture, just words. But I see him there. I see him and see him. He is an argument hanging in air. He is a memory no one wants. He’s stubborn. Little Lew who ran away keeps turning up unannounced. Shoots the face off my peace right now.

  Right now I was sketching his face, the mustache and beard that encircled his open mouth. Two easy concentricities, my favorite design to draw. One circle inside another. It’s on the necklace I wear, a lozenge of silver with a bronze washer soldered on. I believe in the circle. Small circle on a larger one, my child always with me that way.

  I also collect washers I find in the street. You’d be surprised at how many there are to be found. I have three already from Columbus, Ohio, where I’m living for a few weeks. At home I have small pea-sized ones, and large ones I can barely palm. Pocked, rusty, and scratched; smooth and bright. Lots from Baltimore and from New York. Sometimes I think I should catalog them with little tags and note the circumstances under which they were found. One has a raised pattern like a prayer ring, a chaplet, whose bumps you thumb along while reciting your Our Fathers and Hail Marys. One is black; one is toothed like a kid’s sketch of the sun. Easy to slide into my little mania. Even a friend of mine looks for them now. He finds them everywhere, though it took him a while to see them. I told him he had to train his eye for the object he desired, to practice being alert for the shape and sudden shine. And then they would come to him.

  Two weeks after Lew was executed, another man lay strapped to the same gurney. The Columbus Dispatch reported that it took a team of prison health workers twenty minutes to find the veins on murderer John Glen Roe and to insert the shunts that would hold the needles carrying the lethal drugs. Family members of his victim, Donette Crawford, held hands and watched the execution on closed-circuit TV.

  And where did they go after that? After the warden announced he was dead and Donette’s sister, Michelle, raised up the hands of her father and sister’s fiancé and said “Yes.” After they saw the last breath, and were certain he was gone—where did they go? At 10:24 in the morning—out to breakfast? For a walk? To the cemetery? Where do you go and what do you do after watching an execution?

  Here’s another scene about staying to see:

  Once I wanted to squat down and be with the yellows and greens and trace the U of a crushed frog’s jawline. Its missing belly was a washed-out place. The middle was a smear, a wetness in the ease of light rain. And then its legs picked up again. Bent close to it, I wanted to sing aloud the song in my head, “Everyday is Like Sunday,” and it could’ve been Sunday when this happened, it was still fresh. I was looking for its hand, the longer index finger and little thumb (I’ll call them “hand,” “finger” and “thumb”) pressed white to the bone on the blue asphalt. Why stand over it? Why want to stay if the day is so joyously unfolding? The frog was all mouth. The crush opened and spread it and made it as wide as the day was wide. But I was dragged away. I had plans, a talk to give. Spring air, rain, all the bodies filing into the auditorium—I wanted to stay, but there was so much going on. Only now can I return to it. The yellows and greens and reds gone pink in the rain and spreading. Some brown from tires, and the treads evident. The sky was uncolored and silent and gray, the song was saying. But the frog wasn’t silent and gray. Not at all.

  And another:

  At the El Greco show at the Met, the paintings soar because they are huge and because the figures themselves are so radically elongated. I’m finally face to face with the one I’ve been searching for, the one I’ve known since I was a child, looking through my parents’ art books, “St. Martin and the Beggar.” And because the painting is so large, I’m eye to eye with the beggar’s hands, his terribly, painfully long, knobbed knuckles. And the others, too, gathered around it comment on his hands. And isn’t this the way children go about looking, those for whom such attention is sanctioned, for whom finding is daily, who state simply, aloud, or pose as a question: why are his knuckles so long? Travel up the ripple of the beggar’s arm to St. Martin’s silver armor and over his white-rumped horse into the gray sky behind them. Travel up the leg of the beggar, bent unnaturally in at the knee, the effect le
ngthening the foot. You come to it, bring all your desire to the painting because you seek in it a mood, a sensation. So that you can say, by way of sight, “the beggar, pained and cold, is receiving a portion of St. Martin’s cloak,” and be in the presence of something unspeakable, by way of the the unnatural bend of the body, the graying and bluing of the body, which is part agony, part beauty.

  And this one, occuring on a day like any other day:

  Days after the photo of an Iraqi prisoner is released, the famous one where he is made to stand on a box with wires attached to his hands, black hood on his head and black cloak over his body (he was told not to move or he’d be electrocuted), I walk past a church in Bolton Hill, in Baltimore, on the north side of which is a Tiffany stained-glass Christ in flowing robes. The leaded panes emanate from Christ’s hands, his body inclines toward the street, bending, as if to whisper to me. And the superimposition rises. The images converge. It’s the spring of 2004, and I will be able to say this in America and know, reader, you, too, will have seen the hooded prisoner. First the words: is he not Christ? about the prisoner come. Then—though I am not Christian—all those who inhabit Christ’s body populate the glass, and it lights, and the wash of light is suddenly made of motes, of little sharpened points, of heads and bodies like small fists, upthrust. Christ has found the prisoner’s posture, Christ took it on. Or always knew. And since I have seen, since Christ looked into me—what a prisoner I must be. Or speck. Or mote. Or single light.