Rough Likeness: Essays (18 page)

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Authors: Lia Purpura

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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 attached 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.
And here’s something else I’ve often thought, but not said: even the
arrangement
is beautiful. The bends, twists, and dots. Up against bright porcelain. Magnified by and buoyant in water—the hieroglyphs, ciphers, characters (again this requires sufficient fiber /rest /water in homeostatic doses). A good shit is a portrait of health—a study, a fine reproduction. But I won’t borrow from art its frame. I don’t care to be thought “transgressive,” which feels mostly childish these days or at least small, tight, fussy, constricted. What’s transgressive anymore? The measure is skewed and tired—oh lovely and dated Duchampian urinal! And anyway, other things interest me more: humor, loss, urgency, doubt, kindness. Amazement. The transgressive calls forth such basic responses: outrage, acceptance, indifference. Arguments about lack of skill (my three-year-old could take a shit and photograph it! My tax money’s going to that crap?) Relativism, the eyes of beholders, and Art being “whatever you want it to be.” (Bullshit). The question of art’s relevancy. The tic of endless referencing (which I guess assures you you’re alive, connected up with history, hot in the marketplace of ideas, or at least on stage for a few shining minutes.)
There’s
been
a cross submerged in piss. It’s been discussed, discussed, discussed. (I agree we should talk, and thanks for the chance, Andres Serrano.) There have been actual bodies-as-sculptures, receiving the carvings of their artist owners (bloody stick figures in Catherine Opie’s ample skin, across her chest, across her back—how’d she do
that
?—and in other self-portraits, the artist trussed, leather-masked, and stuck through with pins). As novelties, I’m drawn to such things. But they register, and then: that’s it. The
registering
is most of it. They’re over so fast. And not the way an espresso is quick—a lovely, rich shock in a very small dose: which is
enough
. Enough is perfect. It meets the body in its need. You don’t go looking for one more blast to top the rest, because after “enough,” it’s no longer good, just jittery, harsh, and stomach-wrecking. “Enough” is frightening because
what’s next?
Because you’re done. You sit with your pleasure. At a little table. In a certain light. Until you have to turn back to whatever it was you were doing before the need hit.
I suppose extreme things delay the end, create some space. Mean to distract. Mean to extend. I do like an ache to throb or flare: the deep ache of hard, physical work; the pang of missing someone dear, that, if cultivated and tended, keeps presence fresh. But a person who sticks herself through with pins, relies on Art for an awful lot. And isn’t it the very frame she’s upending that lends credulity to her work? The transgressive artist seems sort of petulant, like a trust fund street-kid. And the work like flipping the bird from a safe, speeding car. I know, I know they’re
expanding the field
,
widening the scope
of the acceptable. And yes, I suppose I’m doing that, too.
But I intend to think about shit without art in hand.
(Before we go any further, I assure you I don’t want to touch or play with it—
that
I don’t get, though yeah, okay, as long as everyone’s happy and no one gets hurt, sure, fine, etc., but no, that’s not what I’m into.) It’s the coils, curves, loops against white porcelain, underwater figure eights, rolling ranges, peaks, clefts, and croppings—forms so stripped and simple and pleasing . . . blame the abstract expressionists, colorists, potters, collagists, and printmakers I grew up with, the inadvertant training I had in the pleasures of color and form for its own sake. So four green shapes both were and weren’t a family walking, pigs in a line, lakes, continents, clouds, pensive, upright, venturesome, kind. I think photographs of shit
would
be beautiful. The moment just before disposing of, stilled. I’d want them to be some substantial size, say 20” x 20” and a study in blue—the blue of the Virgin Mother’s robe, ecstasy, heaven, untouched waters, and the background metallic, industrial, lit. But this is not what I mean to do.
I mean to inscribe the end’s particular beauty.
Why is the end not beautiful? It’s certainly easier to talk about smells, germs, the unclean, and to keep things neatly in their place. And anyway, why bother to
see,
if a thing’s on the way out, about to go down the drain.
We think we’re put off by, disgusted by shit.
But really, I think we’re afraid of the end.
Like you, I, too, step over shit. In pellet form, though, the shiny heaped up look of it—rabbits’ and goats’—is pleasing to me, as pleasing as any pile of glittery baubles, or, a cascade of oily espresso beans. Lucent troves of vescicled berries. Anthracite, tumbled and buffed to a sheen. Hard licorice candy. Frog spawn suspended. Caviar mounded in oystershell spoons.
I step over dog shit and curse when I slip and it sludges up the soles of my shoes.
And bird shit: not so interesting, though good luck, my cousins in Italy say, if it lands on your head (how Old World, the sense that luck and misfortune do a very good job of impersonating each other).
Fake shit cracks me up—the kind you can buy in a novelty store and take home and place on a clean kitchen floor. And the long oo’s in “doo-doo.” And especially the tight-lipped British “poo” with its perfect, open-ended plosive (which is, I confess, what I heard in my head whenever I read the tiresome Pooh books aloud to my son).
Baby shit—that’s kind of harsh on the ear isn’t it? Well I, too, softened it with some oo’s way back when. It’s really not bad, just stuff to clean up; and to be honest, it’s kind of sweet when it’s your own kid’s.
So what
is
disgust?
Once I came upon a squirrel, only its tail and hindquarters visible, as if it were diving into a hole in the ground. How odd, I remember thinking. Squirrels don’t burrow so deeply in. Even when burying nuts, they’re always looking nervously around. I approached the squirrel, which didn’t move. The good, solid word “talon” hung in the air, but when I turned the squirrel over (not with my foot, I wouldn’t do that), “talon” wasn’t right at all. The cut was too clean. The edges of torso were not folding in as they would have, had they been torn by a beak, if entrails were plucked and some ragged bits left. This was the work of a knife or a cleaver. I know because I’ve done this to chicken.
The squirrel was posed.
It was a joke.
What the pose meant was
someone’s humor
. And if that was funny, then I was scared. I felt as if someone was watching me. And laughing in a way I did not understand. I’m fine not understanding some things; I can’t begin to rewire a house. But not getting this produced a shiver in me. It came on fiercely and ran through my body. It was smirky, menacing, taunting.
It made me turn away, ashamed.
Jokes are funny because you feel something coming. You don’t know what exactly, but you feel, hovering, a freshness like a little breeze, before it arrives and airs out the scene. The scene builds and holds you and then lets you drop, and you land relieved, safely caught. But behind the scenes here, too much wrong had gone on. The punch line was ill-gotten. A corruption of means. A deformation constructed to make me look twice, mistrust my sight and the familiar gestures of a body at work.
A good joke throws a window wide, a window you’ve looked through every morning, but suddenly, everything’s bright and firm and nothing like what you’d seen there your whole life. You’re angled into a new, strange spot. And you’re pleased to be shown your oversight. To see in a way that reveals what you missed. I like that form of not-understanding. That being-in-suspension until. It produces something very like awe, evidence of another mind brewing a thing bigger than me. A good joke is holy in its way. But not this—this enjoyed my helplessness. It felt no limits. It would not play.
It did not love the laws of a body.
It defined “disgust” perfectly.
Memo Re: Beach Glass
 
Beach glass is increasingly rare these days, given the proliferation of plastic tubs and containers, squeeze bottles of lotion, sunscreen and ketchup, Juicy Juice boxes and pouches, and all manner of silvery, pop-top disposables (whose bright kiddy colors dotting the shoreline are as jarring as a pool of antifreeze in a forest). But I’ll begin with an overview. Clear glass is traceable, most often, to hard liquor and white-wine bottles—the latter abundant in the warmer months here in the East, tossed or fallen from our decks and pleasure boats, left behind after our beachy celebrations of sun and solstice. The browns are attributable to brewery trash—Buds, Miller Lights, and the common, local, sometimes historically significant varietals (National Bohemian in Baltimore). Stellas, and other upper-end finds, produce chips the color of spectacular Nordic eyes, original-flavor Sucrets, jade beads, backlit aloe. The blues are most highly prized (see recent
New Yorker
cartoon with happy couple on beach, strolling the shore, hand in hand, him saying, “You are my blue beach glass”). Where might the blue originate? Milk of Magnesia, classy vodka, Vicks VapoRub bottles, all crashed against jetties or reefs on their journey to shore. And, too, there’s the chance of finding a pressed blue letter or word, indicating a truly old liniment jar, or a blue iodine bottle’s thickened corner worn to a platelet, a sort of halved marble, its center swirl gutted and smoothed.
 
Chips of beach glass are not usually arranged so discreetly (as you’ve seen in my charts) but rather displayed in a jumble in decorative bowls or casually scattered in large, nonnative clamshells. In bathrooms. In hallways. Mostly liminal spaces. Though so many pieces are thumbnail-sized, I think of them (silently, to myself) as grains. Since they are en route to being such (with proper churnings in tides and scrapes along ocean floors), I preemptively call them by their most evolved—or is it devolved—name. So these grains proceed to our shores with their various characteristics shining forth, making some more collectable than others. The main characteristics (of the object, of the encounter) that a sea-glass comber considers when collecting are noted below. You might commit them to memory by way of the acronym OPE—as in the archaic, poetic “open,” c. 1250, which aptly describes both the attitude and eye required for this endeavor:
1.
Opacity
: Have the motion and pressure of waves, abrasions of sand, hydraulics of tides, the peristaltics of passing through (as some must have) various, fishy digestive tracts, worn away the grain’s clarity sufficiently? Thus, unlike a diamond (clarity-ranked and produced at great cost to the environment and with much human suffering), it’s the working of the natural and beneficently eroding world that we’re after here. It’s the roughing up that constitutes value, a scraped, worn, and irregular aspect we prize.
2.
Perimeter
: Each piece of beach glass is a study in the ellipse. The ellipse is a broader, more universal form than a circle, though it appears to yearn toward circularity. It labors under our assumption of the circle as higher form, the spherical as enlightened. In its attraction to waves and their languors, one sees in beach glass the evections of its passage through seas, bays, inlets, estuaries, a kind of microscale record of the moon’s effect on tides—in the way insignificant-seeming frogs best register subtle environmental changes. Imagine, for instance, an old jeweler’s loupe, its leather case dusty and dried, its lens scratched—an antique: that is, an object whose state of being is deepened over time by true wear, not a self-conscious made-to-look-worn thing. Where once was a clarity and, one assumes, a circularity, there’s a smudgy and surprisingly ovule form, all the better to fit the eye socket, pressed into place and held by orbital and suborbital bones. Such a thing wears in a way that reveals a body’s peculiarities, as well as the object’s own tendency to bend and adapt.
3. Retention of the original act of
Espial
. I mean, these are
hidden
gifts, and to find them takes an eye trained for certain tones, colors and shapes, amid all the purply siren calls of clamshells, of scallop-shell crimps and fractal flutings, the rough iridescence of oystershells, the mussels’ seductive, wet, midnight shine. Razor clams bearded with algae. Seaweed with inflatable, poppable pockets (very engaging, highly distracting). Finding beach glass requires focus—a dimming of range, a bounding of perspective. So much so that the actual moment of finding embeds, and each piece retains a tracery of its original spot: here’s the green from under the boardwalk; here’s the brown from near the lighthouse which we reached after walking for nearly two hours. Here’s a most surprising, clear one, found, though nearly camouflaged, in the dry white sand of the upper dunes amid the pebble-sized, extremely smooth and limpid spheres of Cape May diamonds (bits of granite worn in a uniform, pea-shaped way, powerfully enticing, so opposite from the lovely worn volutes of conch and the undulant crescents of glass under consideration here).

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