Rough Likeness: Essays (3 page)
Read Rough Likeness: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
Vienna was far and the light superb. Viennese figures slipped room to room as my father drove over the Williamsburg Bridge at night and I strained to see into the lit apartments, holding, not speaking the word until sleep overcame. Vienna was proper, but earthy-proper. Ever-gracious. (And “whipped cream” there was “schlag,” as it was in our house.) It was something
fine
. Of my son as a baby, my grandmother would say “such fine features,” and
fine
meant not
delicate,
but well-done. Well-made. That care was taken, attention lavished. That he was
chosen
for lavishing. Though by whom was not the question. Certainly not by me, for I did not build his bones. By whom? There was no word for this, and if there was, and if it was
God
, it was not spoken in our house. We had, instead, beauty and graciousness. We had “Things worth doing are worth doing well.” For their own sake. Which might have been pride but felt, though I wouldn’t have said it this way, more
holy
than that. We had, in German, “steal with your eyes” (for my grandmother and her sister gathered their smarts and a suitcase each, and without a word of English, left Augsburg, for good, for New York in their teens.)
fine
. Of my son as a baby, my grandmother would say “such fine features,” and
fine
meant not
delicate,
but well-done. Well-made. That care was taken, attention lavished. That he was
chosen
for lavishing. Though by whom was not the question. Certainly not by me, for I did not build his bones. By whom? There was no word for this, and if there was, and if it was
God
, it was not spoken in our house. We had, instead, beauty and graciousness. We had “Things worth doing are worth doing well.” For their own sake. Which might have been pride but felt, though I wouldn’t have said it this way, more
holy
than that. We had, in German, “steal with your eyes” (for my grandmother and her sister gathered their smarts and a suitcase each, and without a word of English, left Augsburg, for good, for New York in their teens.)
There was ease in Vienna and composure more than money could buy. Vienna never touched money. Not a thing there was tacky. Goodness inhered in Vienna—but it was not a hard, marbly good, in sharp focus. It was precisely out of focus. Vienna was en route, like a star, here-but-in-transit, gone even as I experienced it, even as I breathed its proto-weather and spoke the only thing I knew to call it—and only to myself. On the way to Vienna you might be attended by the smell of bacon and buttered rye toast, or by coffee cups clinking in the sink’s wash water. Vienna awaited you again, afternoons—late afternoon, the light angled and private if you wandered upstairs to poke around in a jewelry box or closet or look at some postcards written in elegant Deutsche Schrift or open a drawer and sniff at the lavender sachets or splash on some Echt Kölnisch Wasser No. 4711—or there it was, just before bed, or very early morning, those points of transfer where you could, for a moment, get closer to your stop, anticipate the slowing, the force of braking pressing you harder into your seat:
Vienna
.
Vienna
.
A word is a way to speak about something that really, in truth, no word can touch.
A word is, just for a moment, what arriving might be like—before
there
slips into
here
. And
here
goes in earnest search of another
elsewhere
.
there
slips into
here
. And
here
goes in earnest search of another
elsewhere
.
One summer night, when I was six and put to bed while the sun still shone and the game in the street went on without me, I thought to myself, framing it up, “The world is going on without me.” I refused to have the shades drawn, preferring to suffer the full extent of my exile, so the sun blared through the sheer curtains, and there was the game being played and played, way out there in the street, and soon that thought became a globe I both rode and saw myself riding; I reassembled myself upright in Japan—which just minutes ago had been under me—and, dizzier now as the whole earth kept going (how
could
it, without me!) I held on.
Champ, the neighbor’s dog was barking
(I narrated),
bringing on dusk
(very proud of “dusk”) and I could picture Big Jim (way younger than me, no fair!) with his folded jelly-bread sandwich, his skinny, smudgy sister, Louise, some older neighbor kids come for the game, their voices grading into the thunk of balls bouncing off garage doors as I walked in the new light of Japan in my wooden sandals and it was Children’s Day or Bon Festival, and how did I come to be
here
and
me
, when I could be anyone, anywhere—oh
Japan,
my word, my key, my globe!
could
it, without me!) I held on.
Champ, the neighbor’s dog was barking
(I narrated),
bringing on dusk
(very proud of “dusk”) and I could picture Big Jim (way younger than me, no fair!) with his folded jelly-bread sandwich, his skinny, smudgy sister, Louise, some older neighbor kids come for the game, their voices grading into the thunk of balls bouncing off garage doors as I walked in the new light of Japan in my wooden sandals and it was Children’s Day or Bon Festival, and how did I come to be
here
and
me
, when I could be anyone, anywhere—oh
Japan,
my word, my key, my globe!
Vienna. Japan
. My slantwise places. My bidding, my practice. I cannot, as some do to prove a point, turn a word’s insufficiency into a brightening din or dangerous jumble of shards. I don’t dream of collecting bits for mosaics, or cutting and pasting pretty cascades. I don’t stand little ciphers on their heads, fracture and sample, or rearrange. I keep in mind a belief (how Old World this is, what a peasant I am): who knows a word is girded round with silence finds a way to realms. Behind a stone wall is a garden in brief plenitude; from the train, a blurry arbor and a woman in a housedress flash between chinks of green. From bed, another country lifts into being.
. My slantwise places. My bidding, my practice. I cannot, as some do to prove a point, turn a word’s insufficiency into a brightening din or dangerous jumble of shards. I don’t dream of collecting bits for mosaics, or cutting and pasting pretty cascades. I don’t stand little ciphers on their heads, fracture and sample, or rearrange. I keep in mind a belief (how Old World this is, what a peasant I am): who knows a word is girded round with silence finds a way to realms. Behind a stone wall is a garden in brief plenitude; from the train, a blurry arbor and a woman in a housedress flash between chinks of green. From bed, another country lifts into being.
So many have come before me, come up against, come close to the task, hands in it, giving it their very best try. So many in their acute circumstances. The imperiled and delphic Ida Fink, writing after the war:
I want to talk about a certain time not measured in months and years. For so long I have wanted to talk about this time, and not in a way I will talk about it now, not just about this one scrap of time. I wanted to, but I couldn’t, I didn’t know how. I was afraid, too, that this second time, which is measured in months and years, had buried the other time under a layer of years, that this second time had crushed the first and destroyed it within me. But no. Today, digging around in the ruins of memory, I found it fresh and untouched by forgetfulness. This time was measured not in months but in a word—we no longer said “in the beautiful month of May” but “after the first ‘action’ . . .”
And recklessly, near speechlessness, so near the snow-blind heart-of-it-all, and sidling close, Paul Celan writes, of words:
and then, that last line (how does he do it, fly both earth- and skyward at once?)—
You prayer–, you blasphemy–, you
prayer—sharp knives
of my
silence . . .
You crutch, you wing.
How can I say this—about sunlight, early morning, the path from kitchen to porch in my grandmother’s house—except here, in the company of others who have acknowledged the impossibility of saying and press on. Those who have believed in the partial and particulate matter of words.
Lustres,
those prickly-bright sensations Emerson said he read for
.
Virginia Woolf’s “moment of being,” her pattern “behind the cotton wool” admitting the scaffolding that upholds, that is upholding (still, for me) that “invisible part of my life as a child.” “I was conscious—if only at a distance,” she writes, “that I should in time explain it . . . I was looking at the flower bed by the front door . . . ‘That is the whole’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower, part earth, part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.”
Lustres,
those prickly-bright sensations Emerson said he read for
.
Virginia Woolf’s “moment of being,” her pattern “behind the cotton wool” admitting the scaffolding that upholds, that is upholding (still, for me) that “invisible part of my life as a child.” “I was conscious—if only at a distance,” she writes, “that I should in time explain it . . . I was looking at the flower bed by the front door . . . ‘That is the whole’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower, part earth, part flower. It was a thought I put away as being likely to be very useful to me later.”
Later, when the words could
help
somehow.
help
somehow.
Somehow
they help:
they help:
When I came downstairs, summer mornings in my grandmother and great aunt’s house, I’d step into the sunlight as it parqueted the floor, I was of sun as it slipped through the lace curtains, the windows were open, grass-scenting the house, and there, very heavy and bent on its stem, was an enormous yellow, or red, or sometimes, best of all, coral rose in a crystal vase, a rose my grandmother had picked earlier than morning.
Thus day by day my sympathies increased /and thus the range of visible things /grew dear to me: already I began /to love the sun
was years away, but in this way, the fitting room/dining room (my grandmother and great aunt were tailors to the wealthy) collected light, and the light spread across the wooden work-and-dining table—brown-padded to protect its diningness from ferocious pinking shears and razors and dusty marking chalk. I’d pass the (visible and dear) black-and-white patterned couch where the customers sat and waited for fittings, the always-chilly black tile of the sewing room floor (where one could easily see the dropped silver pins and magnet them up at the end of the day, if given the task), and make my way out to the porch where we ate summer breakfasts. The jalousied glass blinds were already opened, early, by my aunt, the slats turned with big, flat keys, the bamboo shades were rolled up, the table set with thin slices of crumbly yeast cake, juice in small glasses, bacon on plates, the paper read and refolded. The greeting
good morning,
not formal exactly, but a form to be followed, consistent, and yes, spent lavishly on a child. And expected to be banked and spent in return (I was not to say “hi” in the morning.) The newspaper coupons clipped, the napkins stacked in the wooden flip-top box. Hot pink packets of Sweet’N Low (garish, unlikely) loose on a tray and then, years later, in a Lucite container (also wrong, but bought for them at a school fair for Christmas). The walk through the house after coming downstairs, from kitchen, through fitting/dining room to porch, contained the barest shifts of atmosphere—the way crossing a border makes a trip into a journey. Makes it
undertaken
. Thus I learned to travel in a very small space. I learned distance contained. Walking to breakfast, I slowed like a train, maneuvering onto a new set of tracks. I navigated by way of hem-markers and mirrors. I moved between a line of black and gold Singers, each with its filigree treadle, and racks of hanging gowns to be pressed. I walked and checked the bags of scraps for anything new—a scandalous fur collar, bone buttons, “good things.” We had the phrases “your good coat” and “take off your good shoes if you’re playing outside.” The things of a day were hued and graded, and moved from
house
dresses to
everyday
pocketbooks (in seasonal bone, black or white) and finally onto
good
coats. For kids, the progression went
play-
school-dress
clothes
.
Later there were
evening
clothes. Much later, the customers’ hand-me-down gowns, refitted for my sister and me, in case of
an affair.
Thus day by day my sympathies increased /and thus the range of visible things /grew dear to me: already I began /to love the sun
was years away, but in this way, the fitting room/dining room (my grandmother and great aunt were tailors to the wealthy) collected light, and the light spread across the wooden work-and-dining table—brown-padded to protect its diningness from ferocious pinking shears and razors and dusty marking chalk. I’d pass the (visible and dear) black-and-white patterned couch where the customers sat and waited for fittings, the always-chilly black tile of the sewing room floor (where one could easily see the dropped silver pins and magnet them up at the end of the day, if given the task), and make my way out to the porch where we ate summer breakfasts. The jalousied glass blinds were already opened, early, by my aunt, the slats turned with big, flat keys, the bamboo shades were rolled up, the table set with thin slices of crumbly yeast cake, juice in small glasses, bacon on plates, the paper read and refolded. The greeting
good morning,
not formal exactly, but a form to be followed, consistent, and yes, spent lavishly on a child. And expected to be banked and spent in return (I was not to say “hi” in the morning.) The newspaper coupons clipped, the napkins stacked in the wooden flip-top box. Hot pink packets of Sweet’N Low (garish, unlikely) loose on a tray and then, years later, in a Lucite container (also wrong, but bought for them at a school fair for Christmas). The walk through the house after coming downstairs, from kitchen, through fitting/dining room to porch, contained the barest shifts of atmosphere—the way crossing a border makes a trip into a journey. Makes it
undertaken
. Thus I learned to travel in a very small space. I learned distance contained. Walking to breakfast, I slowed like a train, maneuvering onto a new set of tracks. I navigated by way of hem-markers and mirrors. I moved between a line of black and gold Singers, each with its filigree treadle, and racks of hanging gowns to be pressed. I walked and checked the bags of scraps for anything new—a scandalous fur collar, bone buttons, “good things.” We had the phrases “your good coat” and “take off your good shoes if you’re playing outside.” The things of a day were hued and graded, and moved from
house
dresses to
everyday
pocketbooks (in seasonal bone, black or white) and finally onto
good
coats. For kids, the progression went
play-
school-dress
clothes
.
Later there were
evening
clothes. Much later, the customers’ hand-me-down gowns, refitted for my sister and me, in case of
an affair.
Here with me now are those who know that to set down words is to give to all things a partial face. Who consider the partial not merely insufficient or wanting—because to indulge such a notion would mean no work at all would get done, nothing at all would be made. For Whitman, so seemingly at ease with abundance, the anxiety of sitting down to it, the question of finding a shape for, a precision, was indeed a weight and a trial. Of a bloody night-battle, one of the war’s last, at Chancellorsville, MD, in May 1863, he writes:
Who paint the scene, the sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk? Who paint the irrepressible advance of the second division of the Third corps . . . ? Who show what moves there in the shadows, fluid and firm . . . Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—whoe’er can write the story? Of many a score—aye, thousands, north and south, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations—who tells?
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