Rough Likeness: Essays (15 page)
Read Rough Likeness: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
I believe our best work on earth is in service of likeness. I don’t know what to call it—moments of interpenetration? To feel the exchange across borders. You’re writing, I think, to say how much you want to work for such a cause. Readers, a challenge: hear past your associations with the word
penetrate
; break it down, past the brutish, go back to its origins: “to place within, to enter within, related to
penitus:
interior, in-most, the in-most recesses.” To enter, to be entered is a beautiful thing. Though, yes, how hard to contain complications when bodies are involved. Thanks, Friend, for writing.
penetrate
; break it down, past the brutish, go back to its origins: “to place within, to enter within, related to
penitus:
interior, in-most, the in-most recesses.” To enter, to be entered is a beautiful thing. Though, yes, how hard to contain complications when bodies are involved. Thanks, Friend, for writing.
Dear,
I’m writing again. I’m not finished, though your answer was good. You’re right. It is hard. Why is it so especially hard to convince others I’d want nothing in return for the body’s work. Enough to be the passage through which alleviation moves. Which feels ancient, and clean, like the form of a simple canoe, mano, plinth. Or a very brief poem, a fragment, a moment so full it needs no expounding—Heraclitus’ “the harmony past knowing/sounds more deeply than the known” for example.
My Friend,
Perhaps we should consider the aqueducts of Rome for a moment. These days, in Romavecchia, a suburb just north of the city, runners use the precisely spaced arches to mark distance, dogs piss against them, kids slouch and kiss and smoke under the yellowing stone. In the past, in their time, aqueducts filled the baths, fountains, public drinking spouts of Rome, watered terraces, flushed the entire city’s sewer system—ah, to make with the body such a system of response, a tonic, balm, respite! (Heraclitus back at you—“Silence, healing.”) My Friend, it’s a structural question you’re asking. How a thing stands up to time, adapts, changes. Shows itself to be a passage, and useful, anew.
Perhaps we are too fixed in our bodies.
This might help:
Once I saw in a new, slick hotel a very mod bathtub with high sides like a big teacup. Anyone would look fragile in it, unformed and diminished by its size. I imagined at rest there many wet bodies, each as tender as the underside of a wrist, that patch where life could be so easily let. In the low light, it suggested the soft milks of Vermeer, cream in the unspiraling peel of the lemon, the lilac and sulfur hanging in air, gem-bright wine in cut roemers blackening, mossy greens pocking the cut wheels of cheese, puckering apples, freshly killed pheasant rainbowing dark corners—in decline, such brimming; in quietude, torsion.
My Friend, in order to contain the event you’re discussing—the tending-after, and after, not-wanting—we would have to be different. Wider and broader. And our language would, too. Need and its overtones—desire, ownership, envy—would not be discordant. We’d carry “aftermath” easily with us, lilacs and sulphur shading the scene, the knowledge of clabbering coming on, the turning and souring under our noses, but not yet, not just yet.
If people are happiest when they’re useful, then why can’t the body be used for good, or lent out as needed, given over, since we’re here for such a very short while? Hard question.
Dear,
I know others have questions, practical ones, about love and taxes and families and work. Just one more then. I’m sure it’s related. Why is it so hard to believe that, as seen from a plane, clouds really can’t hold us? I know, because they look thick and solid, they constitute a way of thinking, perpetuate childish thoughts about heaven. Still, it’s hard to imagine they won’t soften a fall. Such backlit white curves, such pearled, gray-bright heft . . . until your plane cuts right through, and they resist not at all. They just allow passage.
Dear, why are they so unmoved by our passing?
On Luxury
No one’s ready.
To sit here on a wooden bench and not have to think of a gunman shattering the train station’s bustle, early light, scent of coffee—
that’s
a luxury. I forget sometimes. Like I forget having legs. Which is “just a given,” we say. But it
is
given. I’m not arguing by God, Luck, or Science, just that it could be otherwise. And “luxury” is its best measure, that unit,
lux,
of illumination, diurnal, in slices, across a pine floor. Ferocious midday, translucing my boy’s ear. Jeweling a wineberry. Breaking in surf, and in outgoing ripples recomposing its silvery veil. Here K-9 patrols are making their rounds, sniffing our bags, moving along. People take mild note and return to their business.
that’s
a luxury. I forget sometimes. Like I forget having legs. Which is “just a given,” we say. But it
is
given. I’m not arguing by God, Luck, or Science, just that it could be otherwise. And “luxury” is its best measure, that unit,
lux,
of illumination, diurnal, in slices, across a pine floor. Ferocious midday, translucing my boy’s ear. Jeweling a wineberry. Breaking in surf, and in outgoing ripples recomposing its silvery veil. Here K-9 patrols are making their rounds, sniffing our bags, moving along. People take mild note and return to their business.
Why aren’t we ready to think of our peace?
How amazing I’ve never planned my escape. Quick, let me think: I’d run down to the tracks, jump off the end and hide under the platform. But I needn’t do that. Luxury, to read in the
Baltimore Sun
“murder rate,” and not have to see the facts of my life recounted therein. Luxury, to read and not follow the phrase down to a bloody, wet stash of drugs, clothes torn and scattered, the whole torrent of shit, junk, paraphernalia jumping the curb, sluicing a front stoop,
my
stoop, the one I’d climb daily returning from work, couldn’t scrub clean, with deep cracks where the necklace they shot him for landed. Luxury, to turn back to roll, coffee, paper. To pair
shooting
with
elsewhere
. To let
elsewhere
be faceless and stoopless, miasmic, panegyric, and broken from mainland. Unmapped. Unsketched. Or sketched very badly and broadly—with stylized “alley” and “pile of garbage,” “shattered glass,” “prostitutes.” I can skim fast, skip the rock of my gaze over the headlines, let it grip nothing, be seized by nothing, just skitter across and sink.
Baltimore Sun
“murder rate,” and not have to see the facts of my life recounted therein. Luxury, to read and not follow the phrase down to a bloody, wet stash of drugs, clothes torn and scattered, the whole torrent of shit, junk, paraphernalia jumping the curb, sluicing a front stoop,
my
stoop, the one I’d climb daily returning from work, couldn’t scrub clean, with deep cracks where the necklace they shot him for landed. Luxury, to turn back to roll, coffee, paper. To pair
shooting
with
elsewhere
. To let
elsewhere
be faceless and stoopless, miasmic, panegyric, and broken from mainland. Unmapped. Unsketched. Or sketched very badly and broadly—with stylized “alley” and “pile of garbage,” “shattered glass,” “prostitutes.” I can skim fast, skip the rock of my gaze over the headlines, let it grip nothing, be seized by nothing, just skitter across and sink.
Dear stage. Dear props. Dear
National Geographic
-toned urban blight shots: dusk coming on and through one framing link of the sagging chain fence, a slick, backlit rat. A (wide-scope) child-with-soda toddling close to rat /garbage /needle. Parentless on the glittering asphalt. A deepening red-purple centerfold sky, generously layering rooftops with color, forcing that beauty-in-decay wobble, ruin-threshed, redemptive, as night comes on, lavish-yet-stark, in this, the last photo, so we might turn the page and still breathe.
National Geographic
-toned urban blight shots: dusk coming on and through one framing link of the sagging chain fence, a slick, backlit rat. A (wide-scope) child-with-soda toddling close to rat /garbage /needle. Parentless on the glittering asphalt. A deepening red-purple centerfold sky, generously layering rooftops with color, forcing that beauty-in-decay wobble, ruin-threshed, redemptive, as night comes on, lavish-yet-stark, in this, the last photo, so we might turn the page and still breathe.
Yes, luxury (in Latin, also:
a vicious indulgence
) looks like bagged pastries, coffee, briefcases. Neat rolling suitcases (I still think they’re marvels), redcaps with trolleys helping the oldsters. Benches—a rich, worn mahogany. Walls—of marble and quarried in Sicily. Wall sconces—bronze, and the whole of the interior lined with creamy Rookwood-of-Cincinnati tiles. I’m balancing on the very edge of the Beaux-Arts here, as the well-intentioned music policy promotes this morning’s calming selection, the
New World Symphony
. And here comes the English horn’s rise-and-stretch moment, all the tender, new, foresty ferns unfurling, slow rambles in meadows, encounters with moss, swallows, silvery waterfall—everything fresh, alighting, awaking. And here I am, among those in the station, arriving/departing. Here and alive. Alive, and recalling how tense that passage when I played it myself, the exposed intervals not terribly complicated, but treacherous still. As every English horn player knows, careless phrasing at the modulation, or a tempo too slow (opening quarters, especially) tanks the primordial, tips the whole thing into crassness. Even today, I’m nervous hearing it, having been trained to anticipate ruin and adjust.
a vicious indulgence
) looks like bagged pastries, coffee, briefcases. Neat rolling suitcases (I still think they’re marvels), redcaps with trolleys helping the oldsters. Benches—a rich, worn mahogany. Walls—of marble and quarried in Sicily. Wall sconces—bronze, and the whole of the interior lined with creamy Rookwood-of-Cincinnati tiles. I’m balancing on the very edge of the Beaux-Arts here, as the well-intentioned music policy promotes this morning’s calming selection, the
New World Symphony
. And here comes the English horn’s rise-and-stretch moment, all the tender, new, foresty ferns unfurling, slow rambles in meadows, encounters with moss, swallows, silvery waterfall—everything fresh, alighting, awaking. And here I am, among those in the station, arriving/departing. Here and alive. Alive, and recalling how tense that passage when I played it myself, the exposed intervals not terribly complicated, but treacherous still. As every English horn player knows, careless phrasing at the modulation, or a tempo too slow (opening quarters, especially) tanks the primordial, tips the whole thing into crassness. Even today, I’m nervous hearing it, having been trained to anticipate ruin and adjust.
Here, now, in the station I’m listening hard. As he is, to the music, in a moment of stillness awaiting his train, this beautiful, scruffy conservatory student, en route to New York with his violin. I see his distraction (“
Not this again, not The New World
”) then a softening, as he busies himself (
It’s Dvořák at least, not Pachelbel’s god-awful Canon
) as he takes out his book, travel cup, iPod. Plugs himself in: Mahler, I bet. He’s a serious sort. The board flips to “Departures” and he gathers his stuff. There he goes, toward his train. There he goes with the crowd, finding the gate. He’s distracted—his girlfriend, audition, apartment. He’s not thinking this lightness, this early-bird ramble could be the very last thing he hears.
Not this again, not The New World
”) then a softening, as he busies himself (
It’s Dvořák at least, not Pachelbel’s god-awful Canon
) as he takes out his book, travel cup, iPod. Plugs himself in: Mahler, I bet. He’s a serious sort. The board flips to “Departures” and he gathers his stuff. There he goes, toward his train. There he goes with the crowd, finding the gate. He’s distracted—his girlfriend, audition, apartment. He’s not thinking this lightness, this early-bird ramble could be the very last thing he hears.
There he goes—off to Gate E, with that luxury.
Remembering
How do I remember it? I come to the patch of garden first, in the back. Then the little
mud room
I guess it’s called around here, just off the kitchen. I enter the kitchen. To the right there’s the living room, a cool, open expanse. Wingback chairs. A fireplace? I’ll ask him, was there a fireplace. If we sat in the chairs. If we sat on the floor. Was there a rocker. Was there a mantle. If above an upright piano, hung photos of great-greats in gilt frames with thick wavy glass—his pince-nez, her coiled white hair, and were they really there at all. Back in the kitchen, I remember high counters and that he hopped up and sat there, beside the deep porcelain sink. I was always thirsty. The glasses were tall. There must have been chairs and a past era’s table, gold-flecked, silver-rimmed or with space-agey darts. How bright and clean it all was. And he was. His neat hair. The curls cropped and tight—or that was the tension’s effect. He had a round laugh but his body was hard, there was nothing excess in gesture or feature. All the lines, pushed against, held.
mud room
I guess it’s called around here, just off the kitchen. I enter the kitchen. To the right there’s the living room, a cool, open expanse. Wingback chairs. A fireplace? I’ll ask him, was there a fireplace. If we sat in the chairs. If we sat on the floor. Was there a rocker. Was there a mantle. If above an upright piano, hung photos of great-greats in gilt frames with thick wavy glass—his pince-nez, her coiled white hair, and were they really there at all. Back in the kitchen, I remember high counters and that he hopped up and sat there, beside the deep porcelain sink. I was always thirsty. The glasses were tall. There must have been chairs and a past era’s table, gold-flecked, silver-rimmed or with space-agey darts. How bright and clean it all was. And he was. His neat hair. The curls cropped and tight—or that was the tension’s effect. He had a round laugh but his body was hard, there was nothing excess in gesture or feature. All the lines, pushed against, held.
And now here’s the strange gift—sixteen years’ distance is about to close up. How easy to say
time-and-space
, to know so little of the science behind it, and know still, to employ it. This long stretch of not having seen, this uninterrupted and very pure distance is a measure of—what? Here, soon, at my door with his curious children, will be one who can tell me something of who I was then—who, like me, could not have said at the time, bound as we were by the present, though we still called it “knowing each other.” Once we had only moment-to-moment unfolding days. I was not, then, a still point to reflect on. Over the years, time gave me a form. By now I’ve long been a contemplation.
time-and-space
, to know so little of the science behind it, and know still, to employ it. This long stretch of not having seen, this uninterrupted and very pure distance is a measure of—what? Here, soon, at my door with his curious children, will be one who can tell me something of who I was then—who, like me, could not have said at the time, bound as we were by the present, though we still called it “knowing each other.” Once we had only moment-to-moment unfolding days. I was not, then, a still point to reflect on. Over the years, time gave me a form. By now I’ve long been a contemplation.
I remember he was forthright but kind. I don’t think he ever said one hurtful thing. The house he took care of, in his father’s family for generations, was a respite. A calm place. It called up the phrase “well-appointed,” but all that means, or would have meant to me then, was that one could find pins, twine, glue, sandpaper, tacks—small useful things, notions contained in Sucret tins and Savarin cans under the sink. Lining the mud room. There were chores and they seemed to take up his day. He hauled brush and prepared the garden for winter; there were boots for that purpose, and boots for other purposes. And the house had a place for each thing. That he was apart from my life as a student enlarged my understanding of a day. He wore pullovers with many hidden zippers, each sealing a pocket he made precise use of. Much dark blue, against which he appeared even brighter. The house was warm. The rug was braided. Or a braided rug might be imagined into that space. It’s that
my
grandmother’s house had these rugs, and my past (with toy cars vrooming over and catching the fibers) now meets up with the space I’m opening again, in
his
house—and I, as the site of, the host of that meeting, step back and watch, eye to wool hillocks and pluckable, heavy black stitches.
my
grandmother’s house had these rugs, and my past (with toy cars vrooming over and catching the fibers) now meets up with the space I’m opening again, in
his
house—and I, as the site of, the host of that meeting, step back and watch, eye to wool hillocks and pluckable, heavy black stitches.
There was something that hurt him. That was hurting and he was putting away, or falling more fully into, I didn’t know which. He didn’t know. There was distance between him and the weltering thing. To either side of the wedge was a violence. I sensed there were ropes, the kind in a seafaring cartoon, with a figure plumb in the middle of coils uncoiling fast. And if, as the anchor kept falling, he
stayed put
as my grandmother would say, he’d have been dragged overboard and down. But he wasn’t still. He was working fast away from the rope. I thought the untangling would be a long effort. I thought there were things, meanwhile, he shouldn’t put up with. A girl he liked who was careless, not worthy, not at all, in my estimation, since he asked my opinion on such things. She dismissed the chores, oil lamp, canning jars. Footstool’s crewel work. Antimacassar. Such was the protectiveness I felt for the house, for the house’s old things, and for him. Impossible almost for his body to relax. He moved very quickly across tasks, rooms, yards, thought. The brown garden mended things up. As did the clearing and hauling of brush. All my key scenes are of late fall and winter, variations on and responses to cold. Tea maybe. Maybe hot chocolate. He made something for us. What was it? What, in return, did I make?
stayed put
as my grandmother would say, he’d have been dragged overboard and down. But he wasn’t still. He was working fast away from the rope. I thought the untangling would be a long effort. I thought there were things, meanwhile, he shouldn’t put up with. A girl he liked who was careless, not worthy, not at all, in my estimation, since he asked my opinion on such things. She dismissed the chores, oil lamp, canning jars. Footstool’s crewel work. Antimacassar. Such was the protectiveness I felt for the house, for the house’s old things, and for him. Impossible almost for his body to relax. He moved very quickly across tasks, rooms, yards, thought. The brown garden mended things up. As did the clearing and hauling of brush. All my key scenes are of late fall and winter, variations on and responses to cold. Tea maybe. Maybe hot chocolate. He made something for us. What was it? What, in return, did I make?
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