Still Life With Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy by Mark Doty

Author:Mark Doty [Doty, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Art, Social Science, European, Painting, 20th Century, American, Poetry, General, Literary, Family & Relationships, Interpersonal Relations, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Poets; American, Criticism & Theory, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780807066096
Google: tLOFoQTMGRQC
Amazon: 0807066095
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2002-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

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.

I tried to move the blue and white platter, later, as the room changed, as things came and went. We both loved rough old paintings—clumsy landscapes, sweetly sentimental renderings of rivers and mountains—and I was forever trying one in that spot, but only the platter felt right. If I took it down, in a day it would be back again. In a while our living room became a bedroom, since Wally could no longer walk up stairs. Then, our big four-poster had to go, since he needed a hospital bed we could crank up and down. I put a single iron bed next to it so we could sleep side by side, and did what I could to keep the room looking like home, but increasingly the sickroom stuff intruded, pushing other things away. But not the platter; those tranquil blue deer remained as witnesses, focal point, silent gesture.

Later the room changed again—became my bedroom only, after Wally’s death, the hospital bed dismantled and trucked away by the rental company, the room strangely resonant, vibrant. A writer I know despises that word, insisting it’s so meaningless that it should never be employed. But how else could I name the odd, profound sense of life in that room, life lived out and through? The house has a decided feeling of idiosyncracy, of soul; not in the wide-pine planks of the floorboards exactly, not in the rough-hewn hemlock ceiling beams, though those are part of the matrix of the place, aspects of its embrace. Old houses gather that sense, and this one has been accumulating its store of lived experience for two hundred years. Wally wasn’t the first to die there, but I felt his death filled the space with a strange, vital light—a light inside the light—so that it became (I can say it no other way) vibrant.

And the room changed again. The sense of heightened experience subsided; I felt as if the door between myself and the other world, which had remained a little ajar, so that I could see some distance beyond the daily, closed. My life lurched and halted and moved forward again. I slept downstairs for a year, and when Paul and I began to see each other, he helped me move the bedroom back upstairs.

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