On Looking: Essays Read online

  I’ve always suspected the crystal ball was an aid, not a magical thing itself. I’ve always thought that looking into it and seeking that inversion, that high shine and upended swirl one could read the mind’s wanderings, hold them, amid the argot of fate and the moment’s demands, quietly enough to read.

  Amber: the tiny faults and refractions, themselves translucent, like little rooms the sun has caught, walls it found as backdrop for—smallest gift—a fly locked in sap. A stanza is a little room from which gifts emerge; also, in Italian: a stopping place. Like roadside altars, or shrines above busy intersections, in Rome or Florence—there behind glass and set into the building, where the eye travels up, rests from wandering and is rewarded for its pause, invited in.

  A finger-sized doll I had whose home was a heart-shaped genie bottle, transparent and hinged at the bottom so you could pop her out to play. (I never popped her out.)

  Dollhouses: yes, until the dolls move in and rummage around and start to talk. And wreck the penumbral, late Sunday afternoon of it all.

  Not wasps’ nests attached to the undersides of eaves or bare branches leaning low to the ground, chamber after chamber hunched together, silvery-crisp. Even in fall, when nests are often torn or pulled apart, so many chambers are tightly capped—and the others, too dark to see into.

  The Madame Lulu box: a pill box I very much admired—and was given by Madame herself visiting from France. My attraction to the box was immediate, produced from the dark of her bag as she sat in our living room with her knees touching the coffee table. I cared not at all for the tiniest pills she tipped out, and only a little for the sweet dust I licked from the box after she transferred the pills to a second, plainer one. I saw only the blue, convex, enameled scene on top: a shepherdess resting in a bower (and this forever my definition of a bower). There was a castle in the misty background and a shepherd-boy so near, who—oh, it was terribly discreet but I saw the implications—bent over her. It was the depth of the scene I fell into, the arc they made, heads together, the tiny will-o’-the-wisp between them in the distance. The scene opened a room inside me into which I could peer, and about which, in college I wrote critically, as is still the fashion today when considering the pastoral. But I still love the box.

  Perfume rings, their domes unlocked and there, the musky amber wax to dip into and spread along a wrist—ambergris it used to be, culled from the ears of whales. And poison rings, as they were called, holding bits of bone and snatches of hair from saints or martyrs, to gaze upon for luck and to ward off evil.

  Music boxes? No. But trying to rig the ballerina to stay upright and so keep dancing when the box is closed and the space goes dark and musicless. How to keep her spring unbent, her tilted pirouette ongoing? To try with fishing line and copper wire. Peeking in, the box half-shut. Being sure there was a way, the afternoon’s endeavor. (Slight fever, gray day, persistence.) Yes.

  Deep in its peering, its leaning and looking, where is the body? Where (use the View-Master!) is the dinosaur, Rockette, icy waterfall? Where, oh where is Amelia Earhardt? I did so love her, and when I was ten, read all about her—crinkly eyes, faint splash of freckles, the soft, kid, aviator’s helmet (so that was kid!). Yes. That moment when a word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.

  A clear rattle filled with little multicolored beads: an hourglass-in-training. And a sand-filled, grown-up one, too.

  On the boardwalk this summer I found the space in souvenir key chains; inside of each is a tiny photoed boardwalk that brightens when you hold it to the light, peer through the squared-off pyramid and follow the scene to its tiny, pinpoint perspective’s end. And there you stand, eye to the hole, face to the light, looking at the place you’re in, without you.

  “The mystery of things, little sensations of time, great void of eternity! All infinity can be contained in this stove corner between the fireplace and the oak chest. . . . Where are they now I ask you! All those marvelous, spidery delights of yours, those profound meditations on poor, little dead things . . .” asks Oscar de Milosz.

  Where?

  A sugar egg is their temporary home.

  Open air version: on the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus in Rome, the chariots gone; the racket of horses colliding, gone; the pile-up leaving a way for the lesser horse and that victory-by-default, all gone. Time doing its tricks, so the deep quiet enfolds. Even as the traffic rushes by behind you.

  A camera: last century’s, the head and back draped, one eye to the glass, for the long, dark passage toward oceanliner, great fire, beloved’s face.

  Sea Monkeys in a jar. Ordered from the back of an Archie comic. Aquiline, shirred: there he is. I’m sure that’s the one, with his little gold crown, fuzzily perched: King Sea Monkey. And floating around, waiting to attend his Highness—all the Monkeys of his court. So that he might best survey his royal waters, rule his tepid kingdom from on high, I shall lift him onto my finger into the air. (Of course I don’t. But I want to.)

  Under a thirty-year-old microscope, the thirty-year-old slides showing the liver cells of a frog, their still-shapely coronas and gray, hazy stars. The heart of frog and bottlebrush spore, featherfowl point and butterfly scale. No longer “prettily a-moving” as Anton van Leewenhoek said of his animalcules, but held, stilled, still available—if a little yellowed, a little dry.

  The tiny person folded knees-to-chest contained in the head of a sperm, the homunculus in his watery world: yes. Even if a conjecture, and sketched from only that.

  Leewenhoek destroying his specially ground lenses before his death, that hoarding: no.

  The enormous prize bull at the Ohio State Fair, whose testicles stunned even the solemn farmers into low, whistling analogy, cantaloupes, watermelons (no kidding), as they stepped back. Stepping back: yes, lengthening the scene, so awe has a little room to breathe. That courtesy.

  Not the real-but-stuffed bear in the dining room of the Pennsylvania brewhaus, but en route, the bear nailed to the barn wall, splayed like a star. The body aloft and flying, and the barn, a terrible, red wind behind it. And everything framed and reduced by the car window as we slowed down to get a better look.

  What is gazing into a sugar egg? A way of being sealed away, destiny-less, in a sanctuary with no purpose at all, save being led. A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words. And in the web between thumb and forefinger, the reddened streams of veins. The very river you’re reading about, the mighty Mississippi right there. Right there in your hand, near the warm, pliable rim of shore.

  Ships in bottles.

  Lighthouses? No, because they have a job. But a lighthouse in a bottle: yes.

  If, as Thoreau wrote, “A lake ... is the earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” then consider, too, the ice of a lake into which things are frozen. Lake Erie ice, the sky griping on, unmelodious, moody, and someone’s there now, at the end of the pier, in the very spot where I once was, looking over to Canada. If I were to go on about the cold that winter in Cleveland, my long flu, the solid grays scouring the sky, reminiscence would choke out the space I’m considering: there in the ice, stuff pinned with clear darts of air, and below that, the movement of water still visible.

  Small pond in summer: leaning over the edge of a rowboat and seeing down through clear water. At the pool, with goggles: the rough bottom and a few pennies. In the ocean, tucking under the claw of a wave. I don’t remember learning that trick, just one day being safely below and the force rolling over, grazing my back. The wild, colloidal spin just above and how quiet it was, and unlikely, that calm.

  A cricket in a cage: the delicacy, lightness, quickness of the captured thing. The impermanence of those attributes, and of those bars. But while the cricket’s in it, there’s the ridge-and-file system of its wings, and you can see its song.

  A blowfish, inflated, shellacked and spiky—and hollow as a mason jar.

  Coral, held in
the hand. The starry spaces bodies left, shallow but enterable.

  The displays at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Not only because of the glass between us, but for the intercessory care taken—so that the distant mountain’s painted shadow and the hunter-gatherer’s shadow from the overhead lights do not overlap, there on the plains of Central Africa, where the “family preparing a meal” might, at any moment invite you in.

  And while I’m in New York: window displays: their stillness amid the crowds, even if the little fisher-boy’s rod dips in and out of a plastic revolving lake-surface, and even if the off-site fan is set to lift and float and settle the silk across the mannequin’s ever-hardened nipples. Even though I sometimes am made to want what I see. Standing there, in the crowd, all the traffic noise eddying behind me—I cup my hands to the sides of my eyes, and though people cough (usually makes for a “no”—see “planetarium” below) and yell and jostle, and jumble their bags and exhort, they are, of course, supposed to be doing that. They’re a crowd. And I, while standing and looking, am apart.

  Not the planetarium—someone always coughs, disturbing the universe. Not the theater, not the movies: too many others admitted, your knee touching another’s knee at one small point on the curvilinear, the whole of your musculature now distracting.

  Alone with the visiting comet. Telescopes, yes.

  Pressing a knuckle into a closed eye for the bursts, as I did when I was a child before sleep, so all kinds of time would collapse.

  The way a busy street clears for a moment of its traffic, fills with the hum of emptiness, which throbs, which arrives like the moment a banner ends in its open-most unfurling. How long can it possibly last, that squall of silence, filling and surging, as loud as anything that’s been calling and calling, unheard, all this time.

  Bubbles. Only, briefly.

  An apartment peephole, if you can tiptoe up, breathe very quietly, and do not intend to open the door.

  Oven windows. Not-opening to peek.

  Two of my friends got sugar eggs every year: Yvonne, whose family in Germany sent one at Easter, and Ilene, who was given a new egg at Passover. Ilene kept each egg (from Itgen’s Coffee Shop in Valley Stream, NY) in its cellophane wrapping on a shelf. One was the size of a football; others were small, like walnuts or lemons or grapes. I loved to take them down and look at them when I visited, which was often. I was happy when, over time, the wrappings dried and fell off and I could hold the eggs’ rough crystal curves in one hand and darken or brighten the scene with the other. Sometimes I came away with flecks of sugar on my hand. My sister and I never got sugar eggs.

  Not getting: absolutely.

  The Pin

  Nothing can trouble the dominance of

  the true image. Whether from graves or from rooms,

  let him praise finger-ring, bracelet and jug.

  —Rainer Maria Rilke

  . . . a chair

  beautiful and useless

  like a cathedral in the universe . . .

  —Zbignew Herbert

  What the pin wants, sharp now and sprung, bright ache in the last green grass before winter, is its tension restored, hand in its pocket, head in its helmet again.

  I’m leaving it there so I might come upon it, so what I call today might assemble—morning’s low slant around the pin’s open arc, late afternoon’s autumn light darkening already as I walk home.

  I do not touch it, do not fix it, and always, by the time I come upon it resting on the corner lawn of the sociologist’s house, I’ve worked up to a good pace, full of intention. And there’s the pin, a prize, a treasure, bright enough for a child to grab, but I do not close it. I want it to be as an equivalent, to match my surprise with its ragged grin, to surprise like desire come upon. The pin is the very picture of something undone—or an elsewhere falling apart from its lack. If I can call the pin image, memento, moment suspended, then the whole northeastern Ohio sky draws close, bends down here in Baltimore, and here come the cornfields along East College where, as a student, I’d ride my bike miles from town, south on Professor, turn east and be gone.

  I’d ride for an hour, two hours and still not exhaust whatever it was I was trying to run out of myself. Along Hamilton Street, laundry hung on gray lines, even in the cold, in late October: boxy school jumpers, work pants in all sizes, the slate greens, the straight lines solemn and stiff, as I flew by. I’d slow down to pass the old Beulah Farm orphanage, its bare dirt yard and one-room schoolhouse, and sometimes the orphans themselves playing behind the splintering fence. Mostly, there were fields and fields of corn, which in the spring made the back roads into intimate hallways striped with light where the stalks parted like doors creaking open.

  Once in the fall, a friend and I biked far, past fields of harvested corn. We rode not talking much, comfortably silenced by the wind in our faces, one pulling ahead for a stretch, then the other, until cresting a hill, we saw a white farmhouse rise up. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the porch. Below the Do Not Enter sign nailed to the door, we tried the knob and it opened. I crossed over with my friend, who in the shaded living room, amid the scattered stuff of disaster I surely kissed. Or, after poking around for a while, it was he who brought something to show me, a stained, crumpled shirt, a week-old newspaper, and, bent together over the object, we breathed our few words near each other’s faces, necks, closer still, until the decision to touch and be touched dissolved. It was something any of us would have done—used the props of the moment to frame, to give shape to our desire. Then, among pots on the stove with their lids askew, piles of mail, work coats and muddy boots by the door, the moment grew suddenly large. The weight of the unknown event, the lives we moved so easily among displaced us, and we left, quickly uncomfortable.

  But while we stayed, we stayed because we were protected by a curiosity so certain of its task, that things—boots, mail, pots, our bodies—offered themselves, first tentatively and then with urgency, as if for us alone, solicitous as all objects of adoration, as all objects in stories lure us, irresistible and catalytic.

  I felt certain nothing could happen to me in that house, or to him, even as we walked through the wreckage, because I could see us there. Even as we touched a few derelict things, isolated, stubbornly beautiful glass things—faceted doorknob, etched wedding goblet—even as he held up an old newspaper anxiously between thumb and forefinger, we were like characters caught in the instant of being created. Thus constituted, I watched myself leave the farmhouse even as I left the farmhouse, saw myself riding, even as the wind lifted my hair, downhill now and coasting fast, the fields on either side cut to stubble, the late afternoon clouds jagged and heavy as purple cliffs.

  My bicycle was a blue three-speed clunker. I loved it inordinately. Riding to class, or home late after the library closed and town was shut tight, I’d practice feeling both its presence and absence. I would say, contriving nostalgia, “I loved swinging the bike under me and taking off ” even as I swung the bike under me and took off. I’d fly, and see the moment of flight in my head. I lived preemptively with loss, memorializing instances. Even the names of nearby towns, whispered under my breath at odd times during the day, for the sound, for the shape alone, names redolent of small bars and lake-side ease and postindustrial collapse, were both present and simultaneously ancient, unreachable: Canton, Elyria, Lorain, Medina. Even as I walked and sat, ate and drank in those towns, I was a feature of their passing. Even then, another’s body was both landmark and landscape, steep climb and descent, breath exchanged, passing current, wave, pulse, there, going and gone. And, too, my own body—mine and not mine, offered, recollected, offered again, until I could see its shape as my own, unequivocally.

  I anticipate this pin, its sprung tension, and my own, as I step over. I am, every morning and every afternoon, with each going-out and coming-back, startled by its shine, by the light so surely illuminating its sharp tip, its faint rust, the disquieting thoughts that come. A terrible tenderness comes: the dry scratc
h of the failing Viceroy on my wrist, on my son’s wrist, slow now, dusty and fraying midautumn; my neighbor, who practices writing her name because she is forgetting how the sounds go, what the letters mean. And from further away: at Point Lookout, on Long Island’s south shore, the pale pink of a clam, its stomach in shreds, its inner shell a purple iridescence pooling water; the periwinkle, washed up at high tide, its milky scrim of muscle and row of blue jeweled eyes, drying.

  And from further off still, this comes: the cloudy hexagonal window I peeked through on a class trip, and then unscrewed for myself to reach into the cow’s first stomach, the rumen, I repeated. We were on a science outing and were meant to put our hands in and explore. We were given cheap, plastic gloves with long, scratchy seams that ran from shoulder to fingertips. “Won’t this hurt?” I remember thinking.