On Looking: Essays (7 page)

Authors: Lia Purpura

It’s 1861. Physician/writer Oliver Wendell Holmes is much taken with the stereoscope. “What a wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as if rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement! There stands Car no. 33 of the Astor House and 27th Street–Fourth Avenue line. The old woman would miss an apple from that pile which you see glistening on her stand. The young man whose back is to us could swear to the pattern of her shawl . . . what a fearfully suggestive picture! It is a leaf torn from the book of God’s recording angel... All is still in this picture of universal movement . . .”

Though the world has offered this space in so many different forms by now, each object or condition still presents itself as urgently as a hushed conversation, which, over the years, I have strained to hear, poised as I am, as this space requires, always at its edge.

Consider:

View-Masters, for instance: “Those modern day stereoscopes,” reads the ad from 1946, “capture and contain famous American scenes, exotic faraway lands, exciting children’s stories in the amazing depth of three dimensions—so real you’ll feel you’re actually part of the scene.” Cowboy Stars. Firefighters in Action. Down on the Farm. Bullfight in Spain. Loch Lomand, Scotland.

“It’s just like real,” the ad continues. But it’s the “likeness” that I like: the stunned and stunted back-lit drama, held still so I might not only see, but feel the measure of space—such small measure—between the dinosaur, cave, disaster, and me.

Slide viewers, where I can see pictures of my father’s paintings without the walls of my parents’ house and its furniture bantering in.

A snow globe’s obedient, minute-long storm, churned in sealed silence. Where, into the eye of the storm, the body goes by way of sight, and stands below the swirling sky and settling drifts of square-snipped flakes, oh perfect and private dominion of stale water, plastic bridges, cluster of cabins, glittery, stoppered, and timeless.

It will, of course, take time to steer into, define, consider each object and condition listed and then to retire, refine or refuse it. Weigh its contributions. Recognize in it affinities, the family profile.

Jellyfish (though the live wires of nerves, those frilly oral arms distract a bit). Their bells, then, laced inside with white radial canals, and a pulsing, blooming red corona. Yes. And their buoyancy, transparency, fragility: the nimble, vulnerable gifts.

The space needn’t be pleasant, since the way in which a thing holds still long enough to be seen isn’t always. Nor is the yearning, the longing to see as when, through the rifle’s scope, I closed the world down to one decision, and the thrill ran from finger, through arm and chest, to eye. How perfectly the finger served the eye! Stoked the eye, assured the eye of its sovereignty in a blaze of smoke. And then a shattering fell from the sky, which broke, among other things, the space apart.

Or binoculars, through which I’ve watched my neighbor in his backyard shooting up. I could see the weave of dirty rope he used to cinch his arm, the tendons rigid in his neck as he bit down on the rope, pulled it tight, and angled the needle slowly in. And then, as he sat back in the lawn chair and waited, I could see, in the tondo the lenses made of sun-through-trees gold-leafing the leaves, the smoothing of his gaunt face, the slackening of every muscle as he slumped and nodded, slumped and nodded into peace.

I’m talking about a space that makes a place for thought, an air considerably pure in which objects—say, sugar bushes, sugar trees—grow precise in their stilled distance. Or perhaps things grow somehow distant in their precision, and hallowed as they are held. “A dreamlike exaltation of the faculties, that leaves the body behind,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, of his “fearfully suggestive” stereopticon.

Being separated from this space: the nightmare of artists: nothing holding still long enough to be seen. Or not being able to locate, use, train your medium to enter that space and fix on a thing. As Joseph Conrad wrote once in a letter to his friend and mentor Edward Garnett: “. . . I begin to fear that I have not enough imagination—not enough power to make anything out of the situation; that I cannot invent an illuminating episode that would set in a clear light the persons and feelings. . . .” And this, in another letter, written during the same period: “Since I have sent you that part 1st . . . I have written one page. Just one page . . . the progressive episodes of the story will not emerge from the chaos of my sensations. I feel nothing clearly. And I am frightened when I remember that I have to drag it all out of myself.” But it’s not really a seizing of the imagination he is after I think; it’s more a companionable pause, a palliative arm-in-arm stroll. One hopes not only for transportation but accompaniment. Sad moment, when my friend said, “I’m not painting now, but it’s ok (he is brave: it wasn’t), I’m painting in my head.”

In the head? No. That won’t do. I mean to be literal here. I mean the actual space between mind and work and how that slows, how that constitutes when one is at work, is working in the space. And I mean, too, the space art clears for us all—that place of density, interiority. I do not intend to be cozy. I do not intend to be abstract. I mean the actual space.
I like,
as Emerson said,
the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary.

It needn’t be pleasant, the space. And it is not necessarily beautiful. Connoisseur, you know it when you see it: not a watering system, timing, dispensing hourly, but a horse’s scummy water trough. Not a neat scar, but a boil, inflamed.

Once I saw this: a man enters a tiny, dark room. He drops from his packet of coins, quarters, one by one, into a box on the wall. A metal shade rattles up and through the one-way mirror he sees, in a room beyond touching, three or four live! nude! women, contorting over easy chairs, rolling up pantyhose, unhooking each other, provocative, bored. Discussion, through the crackly intercom, costs more. He chooses only to watch. And that which is
watched
does not constitute the space. There are criteria to be filled . . .

As, too, in Faberge Eggs: commemorative (for coronations, marriages, and births). For historical occasions (the anniversary of the defeat of Napoleon; the Tercentenary of Romanov rule). With surprises inside: a miniature crown of jewels, basket of blooming diamond flowers, hen of solid gold. And the automata: a cuckoo clock; a walking elephant; and in the Trans-Siberian Railway Egg, a seven-car train with diamond headlights, ruby taillights, all set in motion with a tiny golden key. I cannot forget the Imperial Caucasus Egg, honoring the Romanov’s mountain retreat, and decorated in the style of Louis the XV, with swags and garlands of gold and diamonds, and four tiny doors around the perimeter, pearl-rimmed, diamond-crusted, laurel-wreathed, each bearing a jeweled number of the date 1893 and opening onto a different painting of the retreat. Grand Duke George Alexandrovitch, Czar Nicholas’s younger brother, was made to spend most of his time there in hopes the clear air and high altitude would ease his tuberculosis. A hidden memorial portrait of the Grand Duke can be seen inside by holding the egg up to the light and looking through the diamonds at either end.

It is colossally extravagant, of course, yet intimate, the way the sadness at the heart of any family is jeweled over. The way the secret emptiness at the heart of any album is held between its covers.

The earth, in Hieronymus Bosch’s
Garden of Earthly Delights,
when the panels are closed, can be seen floating like a disk in a vitreous bell-jar:
that
space: yes. And too, when the panels are open, hell: all the gaping mouths choking on coins; all the blue-faced, human-stuffed gourds; anus-prisons with captives inside; hollowed geese rowed by monkeys; bodies cooking three-deep in cauldrons or pickled in spacious, rough-looking barrels; owls on eyeballs pecking them blind; cavernous pods spewing venom reserves; and yes, eggshell boats on flaming water; eggshell garths, spiky and airless; empty eggs with human faces and jawbone runners; eggs in which devils and bones with eyes strum tendony, dripping lyres. The most salient quality of Bosch’s hell? Relentlessness contained. Emptiness filled with ferocious obsessions. Stages on which scenes play out—and play and play and play unending.

Let me crawl up toward the light for a moment with my hands and pockets full.

Not crystals, but geodes. In a geode’s split, crystally center: that jagged, purpled cave where you could live with tiny crampons and ice picks, hunkered down, the light exploding all around.

A cauldron? No. Fresh eye of newt: certainly. Fresh eyes in handfuls, whole buckets of eyes? No. This is not a valu-space. This space cannot be supersized.

Frog spawn, those clear little globes of life, each with a pause and breath at its center, a comma thrashing, growing its thought.

Reliquaries, if the contents—even a shard of a shard, slightest splinter from Calvary or thread of raiment’s hem or fingernail—is visible to the onlooker. Hesitation about authenticity (is that darkish crescent
painted
on the glass?)—fine. The glass can be dulled. The glass can be cracked and scratched and glaucous. Jewels can surround the lid: that’s fine. Fine, too, all these centuries hence, that it must be viewed through another glass, the exhibition case. Distance isn’t the problem. Nor is the rarefied, scented air of beholding.

Regarding light: fireflies—not in a jar, traditionally, but their bodies in air. Leaning close, looking fast makes the whole yard a jar. A flashlight: no. An oil-lamp: yes, its belly sloshing. A potbellied stove with iron plates removable with long iron handles: yes (and at the moment the plate is removed: the glow in there—but not the fire raging).

Chinese lanterns: those orange, papery pods gone lacy in fall, each with a dim, silver berry burning inside.

A house lit from within at a distance—no. A house lit from within at a distance, in winter—yes.

A forest? No. But a shaft of sun through parted trees, the shaft itself cloudy, colloidal: yes. And come upon in a sudden clearing? Even better.

We shall move out of the forest, slowly.

And while we’re at the forest’s edge, in a meadow: split milkweed pods, the silk mostly gone, just a bit still matted up inside. I like to think of an elf living there; an elf and not a fairy. Fairies flit around too much and leave that telltale, dusty sparkle. Elves can be spotted if you stay very still. (I don’t actually use the word
elf
. But I know what I mean: a being aligned with a place and its story; a keeper of atmosphere, tonality, sensation, and the certainty he’s there, unseen.)

Not a bird’s egg, but eggs-in-a-nest. Seen from above at the Nature Center, irresistible the way they touch each other at one small point on the curvilinear: dirt-streaked and paint-spattered, tea-stained and rain-dotted, the eggs of the house wren, mockingbird, and crow.

I had a friend who, for Easter each year, got a bag of speckled birds’ eggs in all sizes, from Germany. They tasted like what I’d always imagined a bird’s egg, held in the mouth, would taste like: fresh, plain, milky-sweet. They lasted for days. After sucking them for a while, you had to put them away (on a plate, on the windowsill). They got smaller and smoother and disappeared—a kind of backward birth. These were nice, but then gone. So, no.

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