Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty

Author:Mark Doty [Doty, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6610-2
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2001-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

The most beautiful still lifes are never pristine, and herein lies one of their secrets. The lemon has been half-peeled, the wine tasted, the bread broken; the oysters have been shucked, part of this great wheel of cheese cut away; the sealed chamber of the pie, held aloft on its raised silver stand, has been opened. Someone has left this knife resting on the edge of the plate, its handle jutting toward us; someone plans, in a moment, to pick it up again. These objects are in use, in dialogue, a part of, implicated. They refuse perfection, or rather they assert that this is perfection, this state of being consumed, used up, enjoyed, existing in time.

But there’s the paradox—they are depicted in a moment of being seen, contemplated between the experience of tasting, smelling, devouring; but this depiction places them outside of time, or almost outside of it, in a long, slow process of decay, which is the process of oxidation, of slow chemical transformation, like the paint in Nellius’s medlar going cloudy under the influence of extruding crystals of arsenic. Whatever time may have done to the original fruits, their depiction is now safe from the quick corrosions of local time and subject to the larger, slower depredations of history.

And thus something of the imperfect, the quickly passing, the morning meal with its immediate pleasures has been imported into the realm of perfection, into the long, impersonal light of centuries.

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