On Looking: Essays by Lia Purpura

Author:Lia Purpura [Purpura, Lia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936747214
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2006-07-31T20:00:00+00:00

The Space Between

Now, more than hitherto, there occurs shocks, surges, crossings, falls and almost scrambles, creating thus a different space, a space scattered and unknown, space enclosing spaces, superimposed, inserted, polyphonic perspectives.

—Henri Michaux

Where is the fear this afternoon? Where did it go and why can’t I locate it now?

A goldfinch flies up while leaves, gold and russety, sift and fall. A flight up, a flight down, the very air marked, so both rising and falling are held in a furor of sunstruck ongoingness.

I am outside this bright afternoon.

And even as I am built anew by fear these days, here, in Baltimore, I am also, right now, assembled by the brisk feel of New England, and fall, and my childhood there. That peace. Those biting blue skies. The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute now. Of course, this moment has little to do with simple construction, simple addition. But it’s hard not to think in these terms.

I’ll try again.

Events crosshatch: the air this afternoon is cleanly scented, still unstark, and in it, among sheering leaves, among goldfinches lifting and scalloping air, a sniper—in a patch of woods, gas station, mall parking lot—is hiding, aiming and shooting.

And here, too, is the heavy sweater I’m wearing, thin at the elbows, the bruisy ferment of old apples, leaf dust, clouds stacked high in the west, peace.

Other things, too, are stacking up today: campaigns for Maryland’s governor, though few of us now seem to notice, so frightened are we to pump gas, to let the children walk to school. Candidates must wrest control of voter attention, the paper says. “Rest” I say to my son, who learned from other kindergartners there’s a bad person out there shooting, my son who’s going to take it easy this afternoon, play Crazy 8’s, maybe a little chess, inside.

Inside such perfect weather, an investigation is mounting. State Mounties are out on their horses, horses such as the angry men mounted this evening as they rode out of De Smet, Dakota Territories, to a riot at Stebbins camp, deep in Montana, 1878, I read to my son as he went uneasily to bed. As the Ingalls family rested uneasily By the Shores of Silver Lake, in the perpetual now that is book time. The children tucked in, the lake serene, the riot ongoing in moonlight, on a night just like this, I point out the window and up, to where “the great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light.” The moon outside Joseph’s window. The very moon that swallowed both that writer’s fear, and mine.

See how the moments go layering up?

These days, late afternoons in our small living room, a form unfurls and spreads its weave—music building and cloaking, uncloaking and reaching. The fugue my husband

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